A big thank you to all of you who helped make the isacatch.com launch party such a success! Nothing like a cool San Francisco summer night to make you want to find a warm body We had an awesome time and hope you did too. Let us know how you’d like to see the next one go. We’re definitely looking to throw another party soon.
I’ve posted pictures from my camera on our IsACatch.com Facebook page - Feel free to submit any albums of your own.

Over the past few months we’ve been hard at work gearing up for our first ever official “launch”… yeah yeah, we know you’ve been using it for months and it’s already launched, but now we’re finally putting our pedal to the metal and getting some marketing to bring more wonderful users like you to the site! Expect to see a lot of growth over the next few weeks as we make strides to grow big time.

One fun event we’re planning for you SF Bay Area locals is a launch party on Wednesday July 2nd. Bring yourself and all your single friends to Madrone for our launch party where you’ll be able to introduce them to some wicked sweet singles all night long. Details are below, we look forward to seeing you there!

Launch Party Details -
Where: Madrone - 500 Divisadero Street (at Fell) in San Francisco
When: Wednesday July 2nd - 9:00pm
Who: All your sexy single friends. And your sexy self of course.

Check out our Facebook invite if you’d like to be super cool and RSVP.

Did your friend just create a campaign for you?  Apparently I am getting a dose of my own medicine right now because Lij created a campaign for me here.  I don’t think I am all that uptight, but in the case that I do find something REALLY embarrassing or straight up… crude, I’m not all that worried because we built in “veto” features.   All you have to do is click the “X” in the upper corner of an answer, photo, or comment and *poof* it is gone.  For all those other people that are scared to join because they are a closet control freak… dunworryaboutit.

Not sure what I’m talking about?  For those visual learners out there, here is an example (see the blue box):

The past month has been a blur and there are a few sweet updates to make.

1.  IsACatch Messages is live!  See previous post for more details…  It took us a little longer than expected, but you can now send messages to other IsACatch members.

2.   We simplified registration.. we heard from some folks that it was too long, too many steps.  Now just tell us a little about yourself, confirm your email address, and you are ready to rock out with your own campaigns.

3.   Congrats Ryan and Zahra on the engagement!

We have been slaving away at the next release of IsACatch and we are really excited to get it out. We got a lot of feedback from our users who didn’t know what to do after they found someone they were interested in. Imagine going to the trouble to create a profile, getting excited, recommending catches, and… not being able to talk to them. Yea, pretty lame if you ask me. Our bad.

So what we did in our next release was add messaging to IsACatch! We know it isn’t perfect, but at least you can now say “holla” to that special catch. It is simple to send a message. Click the “Send Message” button on anyone’s campaign, write your message and off it goes. For those visual learners out there…

Any questions/feedback/complaints? You can always send us feedback (I think it was broken before but it should work now. Thanks Jieae and Jane for the heads up!) OR when we get this release out the door, you can send us a message!

Thanks to all of you who took the IsACatch Quick Questionnaire! The results were very informative and will, without a doubt, help us improve IsACatch. If you are curious, the results of the survey can be viewed here:

IsACatch Quick Questionnaire Results

Help us help your friends by filling out this quick questionnaire! It will only take literally 1 minute, and will help us understand our users better so that we can make IsACatch better.

IsACatch Quick Questionnaire

One reason we created IsACatch was to take some of the stigma out of online dating. We realize that a lot of people aren’t comfortable hunting the web for eligible dates, so we figured having your friends help you would make it a lot more comfortable on you. We’re still testing out this theory, but would love to hear if we’re actually on to something, or just plain crazy. Here are some interesting online dating facts from “Online Dating Magazine” - I can’t believe that actually exists.

- More than 20 million people visit at least one online dating service a month.
- There are more than 120,000 marriages a year that occur as a result of online dating.
- 31% of adults in America say they know someone who has used an online dating service.
- It is estimated that the financial growth of online dating will reach $642 million in 2008. (whoo hoo! good for us if we charged)

Also interesting for IsACatch:

- Sixty-three percent of married couples meet through a network of friends. (Yes!)

What do you think, is online dating any easier when trusting the good advice of your friends?

Hello all! As you may have read below, the IsACatch website is built entirely with RoR, however there is another arm of the IsACatch project that you may not be aware of: the Facebook App! The app is called “Date My Friend”, which may be a little confusing, however I will shortly explain why we chose a different title.

The concept in this app is the same as the website: announce to the world that you have single friends, and try to match them up with good people who won’t break their hearts into a million invisible shards. After you create a campaign, you can invite their friends (and yours) to add their support to the campaign.

We also added a simple recommendation feature for the campaigns you create. It’s easy to recommend good matches to your friends campaigns: just type in their name!

We changed the name on Facebook from “IsACatch” to “DateMyFriend” for a simple reason: when you’re searching through miles of apps, we wanted to use the most obvious name possible to catch peoples attention. When you come to the IsACatch homepage, there is enough space to give you information on what IsACatch is about. In the Facebook Applications catalog, we don’t have that luxury, so we went with an obvious name that captured the essence of IsACatch.

This might come as a surprise, but IsACatch has been over a year in the making! You didn’t really think that we pulled it out of magic hat now did you? Here’s a little food for thought for all of you fellow web developers out there who are curious about some of the technology behind IsACatch.

IsACatch was built in its entirety with Ruby on Rails. For those of you who are not familiar with RoR, it’s an up and coming web technology that makes web 2.0 development dirt simple and ridiculously fast. This is the third site that I’ve helped build with RoR, and I must say it’s really lived up to its reputation as a quick and comprehensive technology. Some other poplar sites that are build on Rails include Basecamp, Twitter, and 43things. If you’re a web developer who’s still using php or perl for whatever reason, you definitely owe it to yourself to check out RoR. Read more here.