If you’ve ever tried an online dating site like Match.com, there’s a good chance that you found your first few interactions with other members to be unnatural — from the awkward initial messages to the fact that you probably don’t have a single friend in common, the whole process can feel a bit forced. Thread.com, a startup formerly known as Frintro that’s launching today out of fbFund REV’s incubator program, is looking to offer the ideal middle ground between these online dating sites and the social connections that helped spark relationships in the days before the web.
In conjunction with today’s launch, Thread.com is also announcing that it has closed a $1.2 million funding round led by some of Silicon Valley’s most well known investors. Included in the round are First Round Capital, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, fbFund, and a number of independent investors, including Ron Conway, David Sacks, Auren Hoffman, Pedro Miguel Martins, Reid Hoffman, Joe Greenstein, Saran Chari, and Shervin Pishevar.
So how exactly is Thread.com different from these other dating sites? The startup is heavily reliant on Facebook Connect, which is no surprise given the company’s participation in this summer’s round in fbFund. Here’s how it works: you log in to Thread.com using your Facebook credentials, at which point the site asks some basic additional information like your age and location. From there, it asks you what gender(s) you’re interested in searching through for possible matches, and also if you’d like to only see people who are single (home-wreckers can also choose to only browse users who are in relationships).
Thread.com then uses Facebook Connect to look up some basic information about your friends and friends of your friends. It shows each match in a grid, much like what you’d see on most other dating sites. Depending on your connection to each match you’ll be able to see things like their current relationship status, their location, interests, profile photos, and even photo albums (though depending on each user’s privacy settings you may not be able to see all of these).
Once you’ve found a match, it’s up to you how you want to initiate contact. Thread.com makes it easy to simply message a member through Facebook, but CEO Brian Phillips says that the best way to spark a relationship — and this is what makes Thread.com unique — is that you can ask your friends to introduce you. Because everyone you see on Thread.com is connected to you through a friend, you have the option of asking this shared connection to set you up, or to coordinate a party or event where both you and your potential match are invited.
It’s a great idea, and the site’s extremely solid roster of investors seems like a testament that. Also worth noting: Phillips has actually been dating a woman he recently met through Thread.com.
Is that an interpretation of Amazon’s logo?
This is friendster all over again! Been there, done that. Friendster failed… and this will too. Also like Engage.com. Although with Facebook behind it, they may garner more usage… but friends don’t want to intro friends. That’s why Friendster failed.
this is overtly about introducing friends. there’s no ambiguous agenda like friendster had. friendster failed cause it took 4 minutes for a page to load.
I wonder how this can use the privacy of Facebook to find matches. Most FBers have higher privacy settings. How is this different than just using Myspace to find singles through friends. If I were Myspace I would push a clone or spinoff into a dating site, but they seem to have a under 21 audience. Facebook seems a bit more plain, vanilla for the 25 and over crowd – which might make for more marriages.
I dont know if they will succeeded or not. But dismissing an idea because some site nearly a DECADE ago tried it and failed is FUCKING STUPID.
Agree
Don’t agree with you. I’ve been waiting for a site to show me singles among my friends.
The only downside not listed here, is: you must have people registered to this facebook app. This my jeopardize this site success.
Have you tried myspace?
Why so negative people? Are you jealous you didn’t think of it first?
It is super easy to use. You hardly have to register and your friends don’t need to register. It is way better than other dating sites. You could be meeting a serial killer on match.com. On this you can see a picture of a possible date and say to your friend, “Hey, What about that Shane guy?” And they would say “Don’t waste your time, he is a real jerk.” How much better to ask a friend for advice before even making contact. LOVE IT! I also think there is just an unlimited number of people already on facebook so the numbers are much greater.
As far as privacy is concerned, it isn’t like you can see everyone’s pages. It is just simple info and you go from there. If you want real privacy than don’t go on facebook or any other web based dating site.
I think it is fabulous, creative, fun and original. I hope they do really well!
Design is amazing… i’m going to marry that designer
I saw him first.
Guys, guys, guys. You can BOTH have me.
ya, after me
no crunchbase entry for this company?
listed under Frintro
Finally a dating site that doesn’t suck! Nice work Thread.com
Little obvious Amy and John either work for Thread or married to someone that does……..
Thread.com is down right now. Nice.
With $1.2mm you think they’d be able to keep the site up for more than 3 minutes at a time.
unless the search is just down, it seems pretty useless unless all your friends are also on Thread. otherwise it has nothing to search against,, seems like it doesn’t actually search thru your FB friends,, only FB friends who are also on Thread.
Sounds like friend-stalking on steroids. I don’t know if my friends would appreciate me looking through their friends list for dates.
Good Point, what good is it if you can only search only people who are already on Thread.com & Facebook. Reminds my of Loopt. Not enough people on loopt to make it worthwhile and this is the same thing.
Also, you would have to assume that everyone on FB would be interested in dating. One thing people might like is to keep their dating separate from the FB like they keep their business like Linkedin separate from Facebook. Would you really want your business associates knowing that you are trolling their contacts for Dates? Same with FB I would think
That’s why they will have to add features to make people anonymous at first. This is something I’ve been talking about for over a year.
There are 250 million people on Facebook, I wouldn’t necessarily compare them to an location-based service primarily based on the iPhone.
Yikes.
1. Why would someone want to severely limit their choices when they can use Match, OKCupid, Yahoo, etc.? One of the nice things about online matchmaking is that you can be more focused in your search (which requires needing a large user base to search from).
2. Why would someone want to mix such personal/dating life with the public life and all of their “friends”? Most people want to keep those two separate for a good reason, if only to avoid awkward situations.
3. Let me get this straight. If one your friends joins this service, you’re going to be listed in the search results in this service — even if you didn’t explicitly join the service? …
I don’t doubt that some people will like this service, given the number of people who don’t care about a total loss of privacy. But I just can’t see enough wanting to use it to make it effective in terms of users. I suppose it’s possible for it to go viral and suddenly most people use are part of it. It’ll be interesting to see. Count me out though!
I take that back – now that their site is working and search sorta working — it seems that you WILL show up in the search results even if you’ve not FB Connected with Thread.
re “3. Let me get this straight. If one your friends joins this service, you’re going to be listed in the search results in this service — even if you didn’t explicitly join the service? …”
>> i dont think so. which actually makes it useless. from what I can tell in the search it only shows friends of friends who join Thread. Which is literally no one.
There’s a line to walk here between privacy and usefulness, of course. I guess joining Thread is a subtle way of saying,,, im here, im searching, im searchable. If you see me on here, i’m doing the same thing you are. Whereas just stumbling across a friend’s single friend on FB and sending a random message is just over the line into creepy,, if you find them on here, they’re subtly saying they’re open to a ‘hello’ ?
“An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.” Nice! LOL
You’d think with that kind of money they’d have their servers up to snuff!
garbage….if i want date friend or friend’s friend, i directly ask out, no need to use one more service on top of what facebook provides
millions of dollars wasted on down the drain idea!
Maybe it’d work better for you if you had a friend with grammar or spelling skills write them first?
I’m sorry but this is really poopy!
Fail…
this has been tried before in different iterations… will fail again for numerous reasons and those are the very same reasons why Match.com works and Thread never will.
you drive a horse, right?
It seems as if the market is demanding a dating site that is geared toward them.
Silicon Valley may not be as apprehensive as they used to be about funding dating oriented startups. Or are they investing in a Facebook app that they’re confident in versus a dating site startup? hmm…
$1.2M is what you invest when you think there is a 10% chance of success.
If anyone who mattered thought this idea was a true “killer app” for melding online dating with social networks, the investment would be in the $5 to $10M range.
If these guys survive the year, I’ll be surprised.
I approve! I’d much rather search a database of people I can get the scoop on through our mutual friends, than a database of people with respect to whom I’ll have no reference point.
Props and best of luck to Thread -
Totally annoyed by the very slow experience and the fact that no one, out of my 1,000+ friends is on this… I don’t want to invite anyone… it reinforces how desperate I might be… back to Match and OKCupid for now!
OK, so after finally being able to look around the site a little while (kept failing), I’m very annoyed that it’s pulling my profile from Facebook (not at all the way I would describe myself on a “dating” site), and the same goes with the pictures… (I don’t want prospective suitors to see my white-water rafting pictures on a first “profile visit”)… I did a search in the system for men between 25 and 40 around Boston and apparently there is no one… I highly doubt that there isn’t a single result for that query (as pessimistic as I might be…).
I’m sure the investors have some good reasons for funding this… and I wonder what those might be and what the target demographic is…
I’m a busy single 25-year old, both on Match and OKCupid. I’m an avid “tech” “web services” early adopter for the most part. I have over 1,000 friends on facebook,– many of these people have interesting friends whom I’d love to meet… but I won’t ask them to come on Thread, because who needs yet another site to be a part of? and what’s the incentive for them? getting credit for matchmaking is a thing of the past.
What gives?
I hope Thread figures things out and matches feature/functionality roll-out to a realistic user growth plan… start small, focus, and target for now…keep us posted though, you may be on to something (connecting through friends is good, but it makes the single early adopters of Thread look like desperate lunatics) but for right now I don’t see how or why I should try to evangelize Thread (or even use it)…
Elizabeth — 7 year single, efficient internet soul mate search hopeful.
I’m seeing similar lack-of results. I think their search is still just messed up from today (or never worked anyways) – cause if I search for Boston it shows me no one, but if I do less filters and just click on a friend of a friend I know lives in Boston, it clearly has that listed on her profile.
Why would they launch it with such broken and confusing functionality? The ONLY thing you can do is Search, and that doesn’t even work.
I can see my ONE friend in the drop down for ‘friends of:’
grr. TC posted me early…
I was saying,,, I can see my ONE friend who has joined Thread in the drop down for “Friends Of…” on the search page. Which means I’m going to similarly show up on the handful of friends who ever join this. Especially with such limited adoption so far, the name-revealing in the drop down is totally unnecessary.
Hey – thanks for the feedback. Glad to know I’m not the only one who’s slightly disappointed about this. I think we should carry out some kind of an experiment in Boston about this. I don’t really see how they can build a user-base without pushing it for now… The other option is to build in some interesting features, but aside from a “beg a friend for a blind date” one, I’m not sure where I can see this going. I read somewhere that Thread is a natural evolution of how we interact on the web, and that apparently it was surprising that no one had tried this before since this is “simply” the “dating” equivalent of Linkedin. First off, I’d like to know how many people use Linkedin for actual “on-site” introductions; second, who in their right mind might think that dating is an equivalent behavior to business deal-making?
At the end of the day, I’m really hoping they get this right… it would be nice, but I’m doubtful… now perhaps Facebook can buy them and make it a Facebook product… now THAT would be helpful.
i agree – i was initially excited about the site concept, but not sure that i want to route through assorted friends BUT if they let me filter on threads by a friend “groups” then that would be great…
also, elizabeth, from that tiny thumbnail on techcrunch, i can see that you’re potentially quite attractive, and i’m single, and i’m in boston…we should go out and then claim that techcrunch is a dating site…you can find me via my site link in my name
Thus making a thread more successful than Thread.
Have you tried using myspace, they use a singles search from what I’ve seen. They seem more open than facebook.
Thread is going to make waves in the online dating industry for sure. I predict they are acquired very soon as the traditional dating sites are dinosaurs.
Read more here:
http://www.tren...cebook-connect/
With 5M uniques each paying apx $20 bucks a month (and 20,000 new paying signups a day) Match is not going away soon. As a Match and FB user I agree Match seems tired. But they have a huge network effect. Search tools are refined, and the community indexes somewhat upscale.
Thread has a good if they can penetrate a younger demo than Match. (which in the US skews 70% over 35). Though in other countries Match skews younger. They need to get the vibe just right for their target – like the look so far.
eric..
You wouldn’t be working for thread, now would you… acquired soon? they just raised money two seconds ago..
Doesn’t appear to be an Eric Fader on the team: http://www.sofalabs.com/team
Cool. There is a Twitter version. 140flirt.com
Most of the site is 500′ing, eventually i got in and it says i have 0 friends of friends. Not that i’m popular, but I wonder if the crawl failed and how often it retries. Not that clear…
Too bad the site doesn’t even work – takes forever to load..
I guess all it takes is some dumb lucky friends in the valley and a promise to buy a presenter ticket for the next tech crunch conference.. same old same old..
I just wanted to comment since there are so many haters in the thread…
Congratulations on the launch & funding! Anything that stimulates more love in the world is a good thing.
this stuff didn’t work for me… 0 friends imported – 0 way to connect. I guess it has to do with my privacy settings on FB. Anyway, the design is elegant.
Not gonna work. Dating sites are all about anonymity. Like someone said, just going to broadcast how desperate a person is. Bad investment.
p.s. Liz you are cute
My friend’s site (http://ge.la.to) doesn’t depend on your current friends network, which is probably already not working for you. It is currently in private beta, but you can request a sign up, and it will be introduced at demo. Admittedly I’m biased, but you should check it out.
careful of this website – it logs you out of thread and facebook both! Boooo!!
Congratulations Thread team!
I’m sure this is said again and again, but “I had that idea” for a Facebook-driven matchmaking/dating service about a year or so back … it’s great to see it executed in such a slick package.
Best of luck to you all!
Good Website