Media Mandible

A woman I met on another personals site used as her profile tagline “eHarmony said I was unmatchable.” I had never used eHarmony, but I was nearly certain that she was joking. Wasn’t the whole point of online dating to give each individual access to such a wide range of personality types that the chances of there not being at least one match worth investigating was infintessimal? Wasn’t each personals site effectively a database that could be queried by each user?

In the case of eHarmony, the answer is no. I logged in as a new user and answered a long series of surveys, reassured by sidebar testimonials and progress bars that I was doing something good for myself, and almost done doing it. When I was finished, I was depressed to discover that I, too, had been rejected:

I went on to the free personality profile, hoping to glean some understanding of why I’m so unlovable, and found that after all the forms I’d filled out, eHarmony had rated me in four categories:

• agreeableness
• openness
• emotional stability
• conscientiousness
• extraversion

The accompanying explanations heavily imply that my low scores in some or all of these areas are what makes me hard to match with other people.

Note that I’m not being told that there isn’t anyone who matches me in the database. It’s clear that my profile wasn’t even compared to anyone else’s. The issue is that eHarmony does not operate from the assumption that everyone is matchable. Rather, they operate from the assumption that compatibility takes a certain combination of characteristics. If you meet the criteria, they put you in the pool. If not, they don’t even bother.

This is an interesting business model. Why not allow argumentative, emotionally unstable introverts to hook up with each other if that’s what they want?

It takes a bit of reading between the lines, but I think the reasoning goes something like this:

• eHarmony doesn’t believe that such matches can actually be worthwhile.
• eHarmony refuses to endorse matches that are not between two people who share a core set of values that eHarmony also shares.

Of course, the folks at eHarmony can do whatever they like. But it might be more in the spirit of “openness” and “conscientiousness” to admit up front that what they’re doing isn’t matchmaking. It’s preaching.

Reports that Google is interested in acquiring DoubleClick come to me like an apparition of my favorite bushy-tailed puppy bending forward to slurp up a rancid cat turd.

The story more or less behind the story: DoubleClick is releasing a new “ebay-like” ad auctioning platform that will compete with Right Media’s Remix. Google is no doubt looking to expand its own auction-like AdWords system anyway, and could use DoubleClick’s old-guard customer base.

Memo to Google: Don’t do it. DoubleClick is not a threat, it is a flea on your windshield. DoubleClick is a dinosaur; you are a spaceship. You are the vanguard, the progressive force that keeps people feeling good about where the industry is going; DoubleClick is a bastion of mediocrity.

Google executives: Have you ever used a DoubleClick product? Have you encountered the slow, tedious, counterintuitive IE-only interfaces that are the opposite of everything the world has come to expect from you? Have you ever sat through one of their insane client productivity workshops, in which they attempt to convince you that all the problems you’re having with their product are your fault? Have you made a suggestion, for the fifth time in a year, to a room full of DoubleClick employees, about an easy way to make you happier, and seen the way they all drop what they’re doing and pretend to scribble it down? Have you searched through their online knowledge base, to find ancient and incorrect documents as a matter of course, to the point that you start, well, googling the relevant keywords, in hope that someone outside the company has explained common uses for the product more clearly than the people who make it and sell it?

Don’t be fooled by the fact that DoubleClick is finally doing something that the trades are interpreting as progressive. This is not progress; it is the last swipe of a geriatric giant’s arm as it stumbles drunkenly off a cliff. The people who run DoubleClick don’t understand what it means to think outside the box. They are the fucking box.

Far away in another industry, there’s something called a “page-one rewrite.” It’s a euphemism used to explain that someone with money bought a piece of property because of its hypothetical marketing value, not its quality, and then handed it off to an artisan tasked with actually doing the work. And that artisan looked at the property, recognized it as essentially worthless, smashed it into a million pieces, and started fresh on a new work that would eventually bear the same name as the first one.

That’s what’s going to happen if you buy DoubleClick. It’s going to be a page-one rewrite. Get out now, or sharpen your pencil.