"Find a Date" service, by Cosmote
05/2003
Dialogos has developed and delivered “Find a Date”, the new service launched by Cosmote mobile operator. This service aims at members’ direct contact, while allowing them to partly preserve their anonymity, however controversial this may sound! By dialing 90 1200 1200 from their mobile phone, Cosmote subscribers gain access to this new service, which presents the innovation of a -nearly- anonymous verbal communication, either in the form of voice messages exchange or in the form of real-time voice chat among online users.
Functionality
Users are asked, when calling for the first time, to create a personal profile where they verbally state their name, age, sex and prefecture of residence, data which can be modified at any time later on. Additionally, each user records a greeting message, which gets communicated to other members: when other members’ matching criteria meet a user’s profile description, those interested in learning more about this user can hear his/her personal greeting message together with the other information of his/her profile! When users listen to another member’s profile data, they can register this member as a contact and have automatically access to this member’s personal information through their contact list.
Users’ options
- listen to their incoming voice messages
- reply to or delete any selected incoming message
- listen with chronological order the exchanged messages with a selected contact
- find people meeting their search criteria
- while searching for a mate, hear a member’s personal profile data and recorded greeting message
- send a voice message to any of the members matching their search criteria
- arrange an online telephone meeting and have a live conversation with a selected contact
- start live conversations with any online members, without disclosing their phone number
- Advantages:
- The design of the service allows the secure communication of its members, since their personal data (like their phone number, email address etc) is concealed
- Users choose their desired means of communication: through voice messaging or through live conversation with online members
- Verbal communication offers directness and usually reveals users’ real intentions. Lie detector is rarely deceived when speech is involved!