Tickle (Love Happens)

(Review)

 

Website: tickle.com, lovehappens.com

 

Price: free to join, but $20/month for 6 months to email members, free for life after that

 

Membership: 3,200,000

 

Company Description

Tickle is a leading interpersonal media company, providing self-discovery, and social networking services to more than 14 million active members in its community worldwide. Formerly known as Emode.com, Tickle was founded on the belief that personal insight and connections to others could be both scientific and fun.

Tickle was founded in 1999 as Emode.com by CEO James Currier. Currier envisioned how the Internet could be used to help people learn more about themselves and better connect with others in a mutually beneficial environment based on trust and respect. The company employs more than 50 people and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

In collaboration with leading psychology and marketing experts from Harvard, Yale, Duke, Northeastern, Washington University in St. Louis, SUNY at Albany, and The University of Kansas, Tickle was the first company to combine consumer insight with state-of-the-art digital technology to generate personality reports. The company offers more than 200 tests (more than 60 of which are PhD-certified) and is the leading provider of online testing services.

Tickle launched the Tickle Social Network in October 2003, which claims to be the first social networking product to deliver deep user profiles that go beyond basic demographic data to include group affiliations, career history, and personality traits.

Tickle was bought by Monster Worldwide in May 2004 and is now part of the overall Monster network.

Love Happens - How It Works

Tickle says that Love Happens is the world's largest online introductions network, where we all work together to help each other find love. It's not a dating site—it's a community-and a new way to meet and introduce people. The company claims that this is more than a matchmaking site. On traditional dating sites people browse  pictures and profiles of strangers, sending someone a message, and hope they turn out to be nice, or are at least normal. Love Happens was created so we're all part of something bigger.  It's deeper and more connected to reality than online dating sites. And most of the people on Love Happens have been invited by friends, or have friends on the site, which means you probably already know people here.

Not just for singles... Thousands of people on Love Happens are just here to help-they're married or in a committed relationship. They're here to write stories about their friends, to introduce people, and to be part of creating love in the world.

There are two ways to use the site, as a "helper" and a "looker".  As a helper, you invite your friends (single & married) to help your single friends meet people, you write stories for friends, and you introduce single friends. This is free of charge.When you invite friends to join they can email each other free for one week.

As a "looker", you invite your friends (single & married) to grow the network so you can meet more people, you collect stories from friends and read stories about other people, you browse profiles to meet someone special. It's free to join and send "icebreakers", but to email members it costs $20/month for 6 months, then it's free forever.

Commentary

Tickle and Love Happens takes a slightly different route, creating the sense of social networking and community rather than hitting you with a direct business pitch to join a dating website. The main point of difference is the wide variety of interesting personality, IQ and other tests available via Tickle. Tickle is broader than just dating--covering careers, education, mind-body topics, entertainment, job search, etc. However, if you want to use this as an online dating service, the bottom line is that it costs $20/month--on a par with most of the other major dating sites. If you plan on staying for the long term (i.e. a year), the $120 is a fair price, but there are better deals out there. The available pool of singles is large enough to warrant a look.

Dating Industry Research Provided by Marketdata Enterprises