Find Your FaceMate

» see findyourfacemate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The premise came out of a relationship Christina Bloom had about twenty years before she built anything. She and the man she was seeing kept getting told they looked like brother and sister, and rather than finding it strange she started looking for the pattern elsewhere: in friends, in family, in the celebrity couples everyone had a mental image of. She wrote a book about it in 2002, then a blog, and then decided the only way to test the idea at scale was to build a dating site around it.

Find Your FaceMate soft-launched in March 2011 with free charter memberships and about 8,000 users inside its first weeks. You uploaded a photo, the system measured your face, and it showed you people whose measurements resembled yours. ABC News and TODAY both covered it that month and described the matching as working off nine points on the face, eyes and ears and nose and chin and the corners of the mouth. By the time the New York Post wrote it up in July 2012 the grid had become 63 points and the signup count was approaching 50,000.

Bloom filed a patent on the method in January 2011 and pushed it through several continuations. She ran the company as CEO to the end. She died of breast cancer at home in Manhattan on 26 December 2013, one day after her 55th birthday, and the New York Times ran her obituary on 5 January 2014. Wikipedia still gets this wrong by a full year, dating her death to December 2014 while citing the obituary that says otherwise.

The site kept serving for about three more months and then simply stopped. The last working capture is 31 March 2014. By 1 May the domain was showing a GoDaddy expired-domain page, by 16 May the App Engine deployment was returning a bare 404, and on 14 June somebody unrelated registered the name fresh. Nothing was announced, because by then there was nobody left whose job it was to announce it.

~ the record ~

~ the face api underneath ~

The footer of the site credited the matching to Face.com, an Israeli company whose face-recognition API a lot of 2011 startups were building on because nobody else was handing that capability out for free. Facebook bought Face.com in June 2012 and closed the API to outside developers shortly after. Find Your FaceMate's entire product mechanic ran on a service that was acquired and shut off eighteen months into its life.

I work on computer vision now, on detection pipelines that have to run on hardware with no network behind it, and this part of the story is the one I actually recognize. Building a product whose single differentiating feature is someone else's API is a bet that the API outlives your company. Here it did, but only just, and the failure came from a direction nobody had modeled at all.

~ the papers in the pdf folder ~

The site took the science question seriously enough to host the evidence. There was a directory of five PDFs on the server with names like facial_resemblance_increases_attractiveness and humans_mate_assortatively, and a page branded "The Science and Art of Love" that walked through them.

The load-bearing one was a 1989 paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that rated real couples against randomly paired strangers on a nine-point facial similarity scale. Real couples averaged 4.05, random pairs 3.52. The authors concluded the resemblance effect was real. That gap, about half a point on a nine-point scale, is the entire scientific foundation the product was built on, which is either admirably honest or a thin reed depending on how you read it.

~ what the patent office did in 2016 ~

US Patent 9,342,855 B1, "Dating website using face matching technology," sole inventor Christina Bloom, was granted on 17 May 2016. That is two and a half years after she died and two years after the site it describes had gone offline. The claims cover the matching method and a phone app that lets you photograph a stranger to check facial compatibility with them, which never shipped.

The patent is now assigned to two private individuals. It is the only part of Find Your FaceMate that still legally exists: a granted monopoly on a product that no longer runs, issued to an inventor who could not collect it, covering an idea she had first noticed in her own reflection sometime around 1990.

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