Clay Shirky has a new and long but also very interesting article about group forming and social software online.
One of his points is that you can't separate the technological and the social aspects. The software will always influence the users behavior. And it will do so in a non-trivial way. That is, it is both hard to predict and also not of diminishing importance. There are a lot of interesting things to learn here.
There is a project I am a little bit involved in - not very much, but enough to see behind the curtain from time to time: meinbild. Even though it doesn't say so explicitly, it is primarily used as a dating site. And what is noticeable are two things: 1. It is really, really basic and lacks many features of the usual dating sites. 2. It is quite successful.
meinbild is simple: You upload one or more pictures of you, give some basic information about you and then your profile is on the site and visitors can contact you. Ok, that's quite normal, except that maybe the signup procedure is simpler than usual.
What is missing almost entirely are the search features. As a visitor you can only browse with 'next' and 'previous', but you can't filter! You can't say 'just show me girls between 24 and 30 from my region, at least 1'72m tall and preferably blond or black hair' as all the other sites offer you. You have to look at all profiles; you also have to look at your competition. Just as in the offline world.
If you think this sucks, then you might be surprised by the growth this site has (sorry, can't disclose absolute numbers)! But even more astonishing is one of the unintended social effects: Most dating sites have a skew towards male members, often like 75% and more. An exception are expensive sites, geared towards more serious lookers. Another is meinbild, where (among the hetero users) it is more like 45%/55% ladies/gentlemen.
I think, that this is quite a remarkable behavior of this community. The users can see all others, there are no selfimposed filters, and this influences their behavior in an unusual (and unpredicted, I suppose) sense.
There is a lot to learn in these things.
Update: Hmm, by data and observations seem to have been outdated (I noticed these things a few months ago, and Clay's article reminded me of that): meinbild.ch now features a filter option and also the gender distribution is now more slanted towards male. I'll try to reconstruct this and see wether I made a mistake in my original assessment, too.