Archive for October, 2010

Have you ever wondered how to meet or initiate a communication with a friend of one of your friends? Have you thought about asking a friend to break that ice for you? We do believe that approaching a friend’s friend via a friend creates a chain of trust between you and your friend’s friend especially when you both have not met yet. So, we decided to take advantage of this simple social rule to implement this feature on our social dating website. This feature is available under Matchmaking tab after the user logs in.

This feature is only available to people using Facebook Connect to login to Trystana because we can ask them to permit us to retrieve the list of their friends from Facebook. Let’s clarify this feature by an example:

Jack logs in and he can see a list of Facebook people populated on Trystana who are his friends’ friends. He likes Alice from the list and decides to contact her. He realizes that Alice can be contacted via two friends of his, Mike and Heather. Jack decides to ask Mike to put him in touch with Alice. He simply clicks on Mike’s name or picture and a message is compiled to send to Mike expressing Jack’s interest in Alice. When Mike receives that message, he will see a brief message followed by a link. When Mike clicks on that link a message is sent to Alice via Facebook to let her know his friend Jack is interested in meeting her. Alice receives a link to Jack’s profile on Trystana and if she is interested in too, she can sign up and contact Jack to arrange a date.

If Mike as a mutual friend of Alice and Jack feels that Alice and Jack cannot be good matches, he can easily choose not to forward the request to Alice and notify Jack about this possible mismatch.

As you see, the whole process explained above implies a traditional matchmaking mechanism like asking friends or family members to match two people that we have introduced it as an online matchmaking system.