Tag based dating site for geeks Consumating is to shut March 15, according to a notice posted to the Consumating forums.

Consumating was acquired by CNet in December 2005 and was later relaunched in June 2006. The sites traffic remained strong in 2006 then fell away in 2007 according to Alexa (the site was too small to register on comScore). The site currently ranks at 149,238.

The code for Consumating went open source in March 2007 and is available as “clonesumating” on Google Code here for those who think they might be able to make a better go of the concept.

Consumating joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

(via Paid Content)

I’m at SXSW and Ben Brown, co-founder of CNET-owned Consumating, just announced that they will be releasing “every single line of code” for Consumating within the next month.

Consumating is a dating and social networking website for “geeks” that CNET acquired back in December 2005.

Ben said that the community is the true value of Consumating and that the community has really built Consumating into what it is — and basically that he’d like to give it back to the people. He continued to say that since Consumating.com is focused around a specific niche community, he’d like to see other communities embrace the open-sourced code and use it.

There will be a new position at Consumating called an ‘Open Source Manager’, whom will manage all of the open source — and roll good changes back into Consumating.com itself. Ben said the code will be licensed under The MIT License.

My initial thought was whether Consumating would be offering a hosted solution of their back-end for websites to easily implement — such as allowing the music blog Pitchfork to create their own dating / social network for their passionate music readers. Ben said they aren’t planning to do that, but that anyone could take the source code and create that solution — “maybe I’ll do that.”

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas. Steve is at SXSW and would love to chat with anyone — feel free to email him.

CNET sure has been busy fixing up its community sites lately. In addition to recent updates to Consumating, Webshots, and Chow, the launch of AllYouCanUpload and the acquisition of UrbanBaby, CNET relaunched popular Tech news and community site TechRepublic today.

A key addition to TechRepublic is the use of tags to categorize all content on the site, including user generated content found in the discussion forums. Users are also able to create a personal space on the site, bookmark friends, etc. It’s a sort of MySpace for tech geeks.

Most of these sites fall under Martin Green, GM of CNET’s Community Group, who’s been leading a hard charge to bring CNET’s various community sites up to new standards set by Flickr, del.icio.us and other successful “web 2.0″ sites. TechRepublic is led by CNET VP Stephen Howard-Sarin.

Online dating is big business, drawing about 4 million U.S. Internet users daily in June 2006 (and 25 million monthly), and they spend a daily average of nearly 17 minutes each on these sites. That adds up to a lot of page views - almost 4.5 billion per month (source: Comscore). And that doesn’t take into account the billion-a-day Myspace page views, which many people argue is basically a very large dating site. All told, at least 15% of U.S. Internet users visit an online dating site each month.

The two largest dating sites are Yahoo Personals and Match.com, respectively, with a combined 9.3 million monthly visitors. Both allow free browsing, but to communicate with other members you must pay a fee. Match.com charges $30/month for the basic plan; Yahoo’s fee is $25/month. Both sites also offer premium plans that attempt to help you find a compatible mate.

An entire batch of next generation dating sites have emerged that are starting to nip at the established players. One, PlentyofFish, launched in 2003 and has over half a million monthly U.S. visitors. Recently, even Google has entered the space through their Google Base product.

One big difference is that these sites are (mostly) free, making revenue from ad sales alone. But many of these sites are also experimenting with new ways to introduce people who may be a good match. More on each below.

Read More

Consumating is a tag-based dating site that launched in 2005 and was acquired by CNET in December 2005.

The site relaunched today with a few notable changes. Much of the new stuff is cosmetic, although they’ve also created discussion boards around any topic users choose to create. With these changes, Consumating is looking less like a dating site and more like a pure social network (where dating plays large role). This is also a sign that CNET took the acquisition seriously and intends to push the service forward.

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.

Company: Consumating
Launched: 2005
Location: Austin, TX

Overview:

Consumating is dating 2.0. Yes, it’s dating with tags. They also use a bit of Ajax in their interface.

After registering (it’s free), you create an online profile. The key difference between this and other dating sites is that you write tags for what you are looking for, and how you describe yourself.

I registered (purely for research purposes, of course :-)), and used a number of fetching tags to describe myself, such as “web 2.0″ and “RSS” (hey, I am who I am). My profile can be viewed here:

I am…
TechCrunch is a 34-year old boy located in Palo Alto, CA who is taken and looking for for friends, and consumating fun!

Popularity
1 people would do TechCrunch, and 0 people would not, which means TechCrunch is ranked 1512th amongst all consumating users.

Once you are a member there are a number of interesting features. You can add people to your hotlist, or just say “you’d do them” or “you wouldn’t do them”. They do tend to get to the point. They have a recommendation engine that takes your reviews and recommends other people you might like as well.

Consumating also has a nice sense of humor to help offset the brutal effects of honest tagging and comments. For instance, they refer to everyone you might meet on their site as “prospective ex-partners”. Nice.

You can also add tags for other people, and leave comments. Of course, you can send private messages to people as well. This uses up points, and I’m not entirely clear how to get them back. I’ve pinged the founders and will hopefully have more information soon.

From their About information:

About Consumating
Consumating was created by Ben Brown and Adam Mathes. It began its life as a joke about online dating, but when people started using it to actually find dates, we got serious.

We are the first dating site to use the ideas of taxonomy and user-created tags to help people find one another. We use a lot of Ajax.

Many thanks to our friends at Mule Design and Lane Becker of adaptive path for their enormous amount of help and support.

You can contact us by sending an e-mail to support@consumating.com.

Consumating can power a co-branded personals site for you. If you’re interested in having personals.yoursite.com, e-mail partners@consumating.com.

Given our competitiveness, we hope you’ll sign up and give the thumbs up to Techcrunch. Email me if you do and I’ll send the first 5 a TechCrunch Tshirt or bumper sticker, your choice.

Founders:

Ben Brown
Adam Mathes

Additional Links:

Consumating Blog, Saurier Duval, Pietro Speroni (mentions consummating in one of the best and most comprehensive tagging essays written), You’re It, 27 Degrees, Naked Condo, Cristian Contini, anarkystic (calls consumating “facebook for the rest of us”), TheFreshness

Update: In a mail exchange with Ben Brown, he sent me the following information:

Hey. You got most of the answers to these right. The site started in 2002, I think, but we ran it as a joke called Uber Personals. It didn’t have tags or anything like that - it was just snarky profiles and a basic search engine. I decided to make a run for the money in early 2005 and rebuild the software into a more modern application and add some of the more game-like elements because a) I was interested in the technology and b) I thought dating sites needed a kick in the patoot. So far, so good.