Having watched Amy Webs video, ‘How I hacked online dating,‘ where she discusses her use of big data to crack the online dating scene, by breaking down algorithms and setting about collecting her own much smaller data, to yield best results. Here’s a summary of the material….

The video started off discussing a brief back history of Amy Webb’s troubled love life, shortly after she describes how she broke down the population of Philadelphia, then broke that down to find an ideal suitor. From the population of Philadelphia Amy had come to the realisation that on paper only 35 men were potential suitors in such a big city, showing that big data can sometimes be misleading. She shortly realised that she would have to proactively search for love, otherwise the chances of her finding a match were incredibly low. Thus Amy ventured into online dating, and noted that it followed a strict algorithm which is something thats not particularly new. She noted that for years people had been matchmaking with such an algorithm, but this was on a much larger scale due to much more accessible data than had been the case prior.**

One thing that Amy had mentioned was her aversion to filling out such forms on sites, leading to potentially incorrect or misleading data, in fact she had actually copied over her CV to the site for her bio, unsurprisingly this very formal CV was not very successful in terms of finding suitors. When she did get a suitor she had a string of comically unfortunate dates. With this in mind she realised that the algorithm was right, however what was wrong was her approach. Therefore in an attempt to reverse her luck she decided to reverse the algorithm. At first she started scoring her dates and made what can only be described as a wholly unsurprising statistic, the more alcohol that men had consumed on their dates, the more sexual they became. The point of this was so that she could get a real understanding of what she wanted, to refine her search, which would enable her to yield better results. This worked so from her study she had found her market.

However, one thing that she didn’t account for was her desirable mens lack of interest in her, meaning that she didn’t appeal to her target market. From this she went about tackling her data collection from two different angles, not just one, she created online dating profiles of men she wanted to pursue, and noted down what kind of women they attracted. From this she had a break down of catchwords and trends to be used in attracting her market. In the end she created a dating profile that was successful in attracting an ideal match, and she became appealing to him, her data breakdown and analysis resulting in her finding love.

Ultimately, the reoccurring theme from Amy’s experiment was the idea of taking a huge amount of data, such as the population of Philadelphia, and breaking it down in a way to identify her market. Once she identified her market she then identified how to saturate this market by reversing the data. From this it appears that relying on big data as a whole isn’t useful without any clear direction, by taking big data and frequently breaking it down much better results were yielded. A final point of impact was her aversion to be quantified in data charts, if a person is unwilling to provide accurate data then inaccurate results would occur, this could be prevented by assuring exactly what is the desirable result before going out to collect data.

To be returned to on a later date

http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data