Matchmaker.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

matchmaker was twelve years old before i heard a modem connect for the first time. it started in san antonio in the mid eighties, on a bulletin board gregory scott smith had been running since 1983 off a single apple ii+, and the matching system he added in 1986 turned out to be the part people dialed in for.

it gets called the first online dating service, which depends entirely on where you draw the line. computer matchmaking by punch card and questionnaire goes back to the sixties. what matchmaker did first was make it continuous, so two strangers could answer the same set of questions weeks apart and still find each other, without anybody in the middle running a batch job.

the technical history reads like the whole era compressed into one product. jon boede rewrote the system in c, and telnet access arrived at the end of 1992 on top of the original ascii interface. a web front end followed in 1993 and the domain itself was picked up in 1996. by then the thing had already been alive for a decade under a modem.

i have no personal claim on this one. by the time i was online, dating over the internet in turkey was not a category that existed in any visible form, and the american version of it was something i would have read about rather than joined. what earns matchmaker a grave is duration. thirty years is longer than most of the companies that buried it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the questionnaire ~

the entire mechanism was a long list of questions and the arithmetic that compared your answers to everybody else's. no photographs for years, because there was no way to send one. what you got instead was a compatibility percentage and a handle, and then you wrote to the handle.

that constraint produced something the photograph era spent the next two decades trying to get back. people arrived at a first meeting having read a lot of each other's writing and having seen nothing. every dating product since has moved in the other direction, toward the picture first, and the industry keeps rediscovering the questionnaire as if it were an innovation.

~ the franchise years ~

matchmaker grew the way bulletin boards grew, which is geographically. local operators licensed the software and ran their own city's system, so a user in dallas was on a different machine from a user in denver. this made it a network of small businesses rather than a website, and it is why the service already had a national footprint before it had a homepage.

those pieces were folded into one company in bedford, texas in 1998, which is what made it sellable. lycos announced the purchase in june 2000 and closed it for $44.5 million in cash, with the site carrying four million users. that was the top. lycos itself was already in trouble, and matchmaker spent the following years being passed along until avalanche llc, the company behind date.com, bought it in february 2006.

~ how it went out ~

there was no announcement and no farewell page. in october 2016 avalanche's sites simply stopped answering, one after another, and email to the company came back undelivered. the reporting that exists comes from people in the dating-industry trade press noticing that a set of domains had gone quiet in the same week and working out that the owner had gone under.

a service that predated the web by seven years ended in a cloudflare timeout. matchmaker.com still resolves today and hands you a page called unavailable.php, which is the most honest thing on the internet. the questionnaires and the thirty years of correspondence behind them were never handed to an archive, because nobody was left at the company to hand them over.

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