Consumating, a dating site with tagging that I profiled in August, has been acquired by CNet. Congratulations to both founders.
I didn’t know that Adaptive Path had helped design Consumating until reading about it on Alexander Muse’s blog today. I am increasingly impressed by the value that AP adds to companies that work with them.
I don’t get why they just don’t make their own… The consumating site is as it is now a very simple dating site which only has tags going for it, something that can very easily be added to any existing dating site.. On top of that, the site only has 5000 registered users, I bet CNet could get that many users registered to the site in a day if they promoted it properly.
Anway, congrats to the guys.
I agree with lalala’s reply. The site could probably be written in Rails in about a week or less, but I congratulate him on being acquired by C|Net and receiving a position there that allows him to work on that site as well as others full time.
I agree with lalala too - Consumating is a great effort, but it’s easy enough to replicate, especially for someone like CNet. Tracey is right - one week of Rails coding would get you something fairly similar.
I agree too, with “lalala” (love people’s chosen monikers). I’m still looking for CNET’s acquisition announcement. I love consumating, but this could be more of an acquisition of the individuals than the service.
While it’s easy to agree that techincally the site could be replicated in a short period of time, I think a lot of people forget the time that goes into the UI, layout, color palette, community policies, heck even the logo. Getting all those things right takes a lot of times and interations and requires having a special understanding of your users and usage.
So c|net can skip doing the months of site design, spec, review, code, review, qa, review etc. as well as risk getting these crucial elements wrong by buying one they know is right enough. I would also suspect that much of the purchase was to bring the mojo behind the site’s indie popularity into c|net where they can seek to learn from it … just as yahoo is.
37signals has some posts on their blog (http://www.37signals.com/svn/) about the acquisition by Mike Tatum who is in the Strategy & Development group at CNET and who is the person responsible for the acquisition.
Does anyone have an idea how much this sold for?
Seeing as this is something they could have easily duplicated, and that consumating does not have a very large community, it seems fair to say that they’re basically hiring two excellent coders. The sales price is just a signing bonus
Congrats to them but like I others I don’t get it. I would’ve gone after okcupid.com
which while not having tags/folksonomy nor as sharp of a design - does have a helluva larger community.
well congrats to them.they could’ve gone to okcupid though.
I’m still of the opinion that all of the dating sites kinda stink.