Author Archives: Shayan Zadeh

A Letter to Zooskers: Introducing Couple Profiles

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Shayan Zadeh, co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk

Dear Zooskers
When we set out to start Zoosk in 2007, we had one goal in mind: to improve the romantic lives of people everywhere. We had big expectations, but what followed exceeded our wildest dreams. Though we’re now 5 years older and 100 million users stronger, we feel like we’ve just scratched the surface of what we originally set out to do.

For example, as someone who’s been in a committed relationship for the past few years, I’ve taken a ton of photos — of our anniversary dinners, birthday celebrations, and other special moments. Like everyone else, I sometimes posted those moments on Facebook. But those special moments always got buried among other photos and posts. I needed a special place for my girlfriend and I to post about our relationship and share with each other as well as our real-life friends. Think: a “digital scrapbook” of sorts. We asked around, and this turned out to be a major problem for a lot of people. So we set out to solve it.

Today, we’re excited to announce Couple Profiles, a new feature that allows users who are in a committed relationship to create a scrapbook of their relationship. Are you going on an anniversary dinner date with your husband tonight? Are you and your wife planning a romantic getaway? Take a photo and post it on your couple profile. These moments are timeless. Imagine going back and reviewing your Couple Profile with your significant other, 5, 10, 20 years from now, and being able to easily scroll through and cherish every moment of your romantic journey together.

Integrating people who’re in relationships into Zoosk, fits perfectly with our vision as a romantic social network. Now every user has the ability to create an Individual Profile — as well as a Couple Profile if he/she is in a relationship. As always, only your real-life friends can see your Individual or Couple Profiles (our Personals Application automatically turns off and disappears for you and your partner since you’re lucky enough to have found that special someone already).

We hope you create and share your romantic journey on Zoosk.

Thank you for reading and Happy Zoosking!

Shayan Zadeh,
Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Zoosk.com

PS. If you’re in a committed relationship, you can learn more and set up your Couple Profile here.

Nouvelle Page d’Accueil, Bienvenue chez Zoosk!

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L’équipe Zoosk travaille continuellement sur l’ajout de nouvelles fonctionnalités afin d’améliorer votre expérience. Cette fois-ci nous vous offrons une page d’Accueil…

La page d’Accueil Zoosk est en cours de déploiement et sera disponible pour tous les Zooskeurs d’ici quelques semaines.

A chaque nouvelle version de Zoosk, notre équipe s’efforce d’améliorer votre expérience. Cette nouvelle page d’Accueil a été conçue pour vous présenter un flux en temps réel présentant un résumé de l’activité des autres Zooskeurs ainsi qu’un point d’accès aux principales fonctionnalités de Zoosk pour faciliter votre navigation et la prise de contact.

Flux Zoosk

Vous pourrez désormais découvrir les Zooskers qui viennent de s’inscrire, ceux qui ont mis-à-jour leur profil et suivre les dernières évolutions de la communauté.

Flux Zoosk

Les actualités dans votre flux Zoosk vous présenteront de nouveaux Zooskers qui vous correspondent sur la base de vos précédentes recherches et de vos Rencontres. Les actualités sont un bon moyen d’entrer en contact, et un moyen efficace d’attirer l’attention de personnes que n’auriez peu être pas rencontrées par une recherche classique. Le flux d’actualité est rafraichi continuellement, donc n’hésitez pas à vous connecter plusieurs fois par jour pour voir ce qu’il s’y passe.

Un accès simplifié aux fonctionnalités Zoosk

Vous avez accès à tous les outils pour faire des rencontres:

  • Recherche: Sélectionner les caractéristiques de votre partenaire idéal, et parcourez immédiatement les résultats qui correspondent à vos critères.
  • Emails: Identifier d’un coup d’œil combien de nouveaux emails vous attendent.
  • Coups de Cœur: Découvrez qui a flashé sur vous. Est-ce réciproque ?
  • Visites reçues: Vous aimeriez savoir qui a consulté votre Profil? Cliquez sur ce lien pour le découvrir.
  • Prochaine étape? Découvrez nos suggestions pour améliorer votre profil.

Vous avez de la chance?

Vous vous souvenez de la page de Rencontres? Pas d’inquiétude, elle n’a pas disparu, c’est encore plus facile depuis la page d’accueil ! Vous pouvez accéder à l’ancienne page de Rencontres en cliquant sur le lien “plein écran” juste a côté du titre « Vous avez de la chance ? ». Comme auparavant, vous pouvez naviguer d’un profil à l’autre. Vous apercevez quelqu’un qui vous plaît ? Consultez leur profil, envoyer un clin d’œil, un email ou bien passez à la personne suivante.

chance

L’équipe Zoosk s’applique à vous proposer une plateforme facile d’utilisation tout en ajoutant de nouvelles fonctionnalités qui répondent à vous besoin.

Nous souhaitons nous assurer que Zoosk est sur la bonne voie. Que pensez-vous de la nouvelle page d’Accueil ? Tous les tests du monde ne sauraient remplacer vos réactions.
Si vous avez des commentaires ou suggestions, nous voulons le savoir ! Rendez-vous sur la page de la communauté Zoosk et dites-nous ce que vous pensez de la page d’Accueil.

100,000,000 matches and counting

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Lately, I have seen a ton of folks announcing hitting milestones in their communities and celebrating them all. So I thought about major milestones that Zoosk has hit recently. It turns out we had a few of our own this summer:

100,000,000 Matches

On August 21st, we crossed 100 million conversation mark. In other words, since Zoosk’s birthday, we have enabled 100 million pairs to match and have conversations with each other through Zoosk. Some of these matches have turned into friendly flirts, some into dates, and some into relationships that will last for a long time. We have already received invitations to some of the weddings that have happened through Zoosk and know of Zoosk babies that are due soon :-) . We always love to hear Zoosk stories, so please share yours.

8,000,000 Zooskers

About three weeks later, the number of users on Zoosk crossed 8 million which makes for a very big, happy family. These Zooskers are coming from almost all countries on the planet speaking many languages which makes for a very fun family reunion party.

We here at Zoosk have had a ton fun helping to grow this community to where it is today and we are very thankful to every single Zoosker for making the site a better place by their presence. But we are just getting started. Zoosk isn’t even one year old and these milestones, as impressive as they are, will only be the stepping stones for bigger things for the Zoosk community.

The interesting thing is that we didn’t even notice that we have crossed these milestones. Our team is super focused on making the experience better for our users everyday and these milestones are simply byproducts of making our users happier with Zoosk.

Happy Zoosking!

Elastic Computing with Amazon Web Service

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Given the viral nature of our products, we have learned – at times the hard way – how valuable it is to be able to add capacity on-demand when we roll out a new feature or product [I will be talking more about scaling at O'Reilly Velocity Conference if you are interested]. One of the features that we released in the early days of Zoosk was the ability for users to upload multiple images to their Date Cards if they wanted to separate their dating identity from their Facebook identity (BTW, Zoosk is the only dating application on social networks that doesn’t rely on the underlying platform for picture handling and enables users to keep their dating persona separate!).

When we were designing this feature we had a feeling it will be a huge hit given the feedback we were getting from our users. However, it was really hard for us to gauge how much capacity we need to plan for and we didn’t want to spend a ton of money on infrastructure to accommodate a feature that might not turn out as big as you think it will (startups MUST be frugal to survive!).

So we decided to use Amazon Web Services for our photo processing subsystem to give us the maximum flexibility in terms of capacity planning while keeping our costs down. We had a few requirements for our design:

  • Should scale horizontally
  • Should be fairly decoupled from our existing data center (not expose our DBs to public network)
  • Should be cost effective

In order to satisfy our second requirement above, we had to figure out a way to keep track of the in-progress-jobs without depending on our databases. Fortunately Amazon has a Simple Queue Service (SQS) that is very well suited for this purpose. We basically use it as a job queue for our photo processing.

Our ability to scale horizontally meant that we had to be able to add processing boxes on-demand as our load varied. We decided to utilize Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for this purpose.

Our process is conceptually very simple. Each photo uploaded by our users temporarily is stored on our data center. We have worker processes that copy these raw files to S3 for backup and also create a ticket in an SQS queue for it to be processed. Once in the queue, the next available processor on EC2 will pickup the ticket, process the photo, publish the output to proper location on S3 and then create a “done” ticket in another SQS queue. In our data center, we look for these “done” tickets and mark completed photos ready-to-serve for our users.

Zoosk Elastic Photo Kitchen

You might ask if all this complexity was worth it. It turned out that the photo feature was a big hit with our users. With millions of photos uploaded in the past few months, we are sure glad we designed the system this way and we love our ability to adjust our capacity on-demand for this feature.

Just to put the advantages of using cloud computing in perspective, I have summarized the size of photo data we have stored on Amazon S3 and also how much content we serve off of it in the following charts. Yes, those axises show numbers in TeraByte range :-) . We would have really had a tough time to expand our data center to meet this load on top of the existing usage growth that we had to deal with. Off loading this work to Amazon has certainly paid off for us.


Zoosk Photo Data Storage (GB)

Zoosk Photo Data Served (GB)

If you are interested in more Amazon Web Services usage data, checkout the 37signals blog as they chronicle their usage of the S3 service.

Zoosk closes round of financing

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Last week we announced the closing of the second rounding of financing by the company. We are super excited to welcome Canaan Partners to the Zoosk team. As mentioned in our press release, we will use the funds to expand our marketing efforts, increase our subscriber base across additional social networks and develop compelling new features for the network.

You can see some of the coverage of the news below:

New York Times: Dating Network Zoosk Raises $4.1 Million

VentureBeat: Dating site Zoosk raises $4.1

alarm:clock: Facebook Dating Startup Zoosk Raises $4.1M

Online Dating Insider: Dating & Discovery Services Raising Big Bucks

Pulse 2.0: Dating Application Zoosk Raises $4.1 Million Second Round

Zoosk is on MySpace

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Last month we wrote about Zoosk’s plans to extend beyond just Facebook, with our Bebo launch. We are pleased to announce that we have grown the Zoosk network even further by bringing the Zoosk experience to MySpace. Visit Zoosk on MySpace, add it to your friends, and enjoy the same awesome experience there.

MySpace platform is still in Beta, but working with their team, we believe we have worked out most of the kinks at this point. As always, please let us know what you think by emailing our support team. We are always looking to improve the service.

The Holy Grail: X Above 1.0

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Dave at Online Dating Insider did an interview with our very own Alex a couple of weeks ago. He has a post out today about the interview, his experience with Zoosk and why he thinks the new paradigm of social dating is here to stay. I love the fact that he actually went down to an extreme level of detail on viral growth and it’s inner workings using our internal lingo. Now, X-multiplier is officially introduced to the public world.

His post is fairly balanced at times criticizing us for a few features that we are missing at the moment. But Zooskers don’t be worried, they on their way and coming very quickly. Zoosk is just getting started to shake the online dating world.

Photo Gallery and Ignore Features

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Two of the most requested features on Zoosk have been the ability to include more photos
in date cards and to block certain flirts. We are happy to announce that with our most recent release,
we have added both of these capabilities.

Photo Gallery

Zoosk Photo Gallery Now, you can go to your date card and add more photos for others to see. We have tried to keep the process super simple. You can click on the ‘Edit’ link in front of the ‘Your Photos’ heading or on the red box below your primary photo. Both of them take you to the gallery page where you can add more photos, remove old ones, or change your primary photo.

Once you upload a photo, it might take a few minutes for our system to process it, after which it will show up on your date card. Your primary photo is always loaded by default with other photos having their thumbnail version show up below it. Viewers of your date card can click on the thumbnails to see a larger version of each photo.

Ignore User

It has happened to all of us, sometimes we get approached by people we don’t really want to communicate with for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s the language they use to start a conversation and at times it’s pure personal choice. Whatever the reason, we don’t want to hear back from them again. Well, now on Zoosk you can easily manage who can communicate with you.

Zoosk Ignore User

Simple go to your ZooskBox, find the person you don’t want to hear back from and click on the ‘Ignore User’ action. You will not see any flirts from them until you remove them from your ignore list (you can manage that in your settings page). They will not know that you have ignored them so no feelings will be hurt.

We hope these features improve your Zoosk experience. As always feel free to let us know what you think. We are always listening.

Zoosk Coming to a Bebo Near You

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Zoosk has been a success story on Facebook. Naturally, we thought maybe users of other social networks will enjoy it as well. So we got to work on building the Zoosk Network. Our newest member social network is Bebo. Now Bebo users can enjoy the benefits of the fastest growing social dating destination in convenience of their preferred social network. You can check out Zoosk on Bebo here.

Zoosk Network

One of the benefits of the Zoosk Network is it’s ability to span closed social networks. It is great that we have been enabling Facebook users to meet new people and find their soulmates. It’s also awesome that now Bebo members can do the same! But it’s even greater that now Bebo users can meet Facebook users and vice versa without leaving their social network and at times without even knowing about it! Yes, you heard it right: regardless of how you joined Zoosk, you can immediately meet millions of other Zooskers right from your favorite social network. So, Bebo Zooskers say hi to 1,800,000 Facebook Zooskers. And Facebook Zooskers, please welcome the new members of the Zoosk family :) .

Zoosk is the first social dating property that has broken the closed social network walls in a very interesting and valuable way. We believe this is just the start and many other social applications will follow this trend soon. The era of Meta Social Applications is upon us. And Zoosk is proud to be a founding member.

Guess Who is Next

If you can guess the next member of the Zoosk Network, send us the name at stories at zoosk dot com along with why you think so. We will pick 10 correct respondents and they will receive $10 Zoosk Money to use towards Super Flirts. Happy Zoosking!