Online Dating Site Finds a Match with Userplane IM

by Ron Miller
May 18, 2007

A few years ago, PlentyofFish.com founder Markus Frind found himself in between jobs and looking for a new skill. In order to teach himself ASP.NET programming, he developed PlentyofFish.com, a free online dating service. When the site took off, Frind turned to Userplane to add instant messaging functionality for his users.

Selecting an IM Solution

PlentyofFish turned out to be more successful than Frind ever dreamed. Within months of turning it on, Frind says, he was up to several hundred thousand users. Today he serves over a billion pages a month, and he says PlentyofFish is one of the top 50 sites in the English-speaking world. As the site grew, Frind realized he needed a way for his users to communicate with another, and that's when he went looking for a service like Userplane.

Figure 1. Portion of the PlentyofFish.com front page

Back in the 2003 or 2004 timeframe, when he was looking for a solution, he looked at three or four companies. "I [checked out] several instant messaging providers and I found Userplane. It was the only one on the market that could remotely do what I wanted," Frind says. While he explored other solutions, Frind needed an instant messaging solution that scaled, something competitors at the time couldn't do and something, given his rapidly growing user base, that was an absolute must. What's more, he says, competing products had limited functionality with lots of users complaining about crashing. "Userplane was the only product on the market at that time that was even remotely usable," Frind says. He particularly liked that it was written in Flash instead of Java.

Installation and Getting Started

After Frind decided to go with Userplane, his next step was to order and install the software, a straightforward process that he reports only took a couple of hours. "It was easy because they sent me an ASP.NET file. All I had to do was just fill in the database code to access my database. It was pretty simple. I just needed to connect it to my database system and pull out the user data and send it to [the client]. When the [instant messaging client] pops up, it has to put in the user image and I had to pass the parameters," Frind says.

In fact, the only issue he encountered turned out to his own error, something that took some time trying to figure out. "I enabled compression and Userplane didn't support compression at the time. What happens is you can compress ASP pages up to 50 or 60 percent and I enabled that, but Flash doesn't support that, so I was really confused for a while." He says he ended up crashing the servers, which left him scratching his head before he realized it was due to the unsupported compression setting.

Documentation and Customization

The Userplane instant messaging product came with a couple of pieces of documentation, but Frind relied on the code sample to help him with the installation process. "Because they included sample code, I didn't have to use documentation," Frind says. He adds, "If code is well documented you don't have to look at the documentation, and I would rather not look at it if I can help it." Userplane also gave him access to a test site to test his calls, which he says was very helpful.

Frind reports that Userplane basically worked out of the box and didn't require much customization beyond normal branding. "I did put up my PlentyofFish logo as a background, but I really didn't do too much customization. I just like to throw things up on the site and see if they work. If they work the first time around, that's good. If they don't work, I start modifying to see what it can do better, but if it works first time around, then I'm happy," Frind reports.

IM In Action on PlentyofFish

While Frind likes having instant messaging on his site, it has the negative effect of taking away from his page views, so he actually limits how much his users can use IM. "I don't want too many people using Userplane because they are not on my site as much and I show less activity. So I have to balance between the IM side and the web side," he says. Frind explains that part of his audience likes IM and wants that instant communication method, while others never use it. But if he had critical mass in Userplane, it would adversely affect PlentyofFish, because there wouldn't be enough people to sustain a social dating site like his.

To control this, Frind had to decide who gets to use IM and how many people they can be communicating with at one moment in time. "If you log onto the site and you are a woman with a hot picture, you are going to get 30 IMs in the span of 30 seconds," he says. "So I've put filters into place, so you can have a maximum of five IM sessions at the same time." Frind explains that he wrote some code to control IM access. "In the code, I scripted the code for who the instant messaging button shows up, and what pages, and stuff like that. The trouble with Userplane is that it's too damn popular and I have to manage who gets to use it and at what times."

Frind says the scripts control everything automatically in the background, so he doesn't have to monitor IM use himself, something given his site's IM popularity and the fact he is a one-man shop would be virtually impossible to do. "There are millions of people logging in. I can't manually control everything. I compile stats and if a trigger is met, the code does this or that," he says.

So far, Frind has only used Userplane instant messaging, but he has been thinking about adding chat and some other Userplane services. He says they are on his lengthy testing to-do list. He also has implemented Userplane ads, so instead of paying a monthly fee for the service, Userplane pays him. Frind says he still keeps an eye on competing products to see if anything new or different has come along, but he says, so far at least, there is nothing out there remotely close.

References

• PlentyofFish.com: "The world's largest online dating site, 100 percent free"
• Userplane: "The premier provider of communication software for online communities"
• Userplane Webmessenger: "The next generation of instant messaging software"