Aubi and I stumbled across an amusing quasi-personals site called Consumating. It started as a dating site spoof, but seems to have taken off. The tagline, “Hot nerdy girls and indie rock boys! With glasses!”, was enough to grab my attention. The unique thing about the site is that it uses tags and random “Question of the Week” contests to allow people to describe themselves rather than boring old singles profiles. Also, don’t ask me how, but the photos seem uniformly bigger and more attractive than other such sites.

From a technical/business standpoint, I found two things interesting about the site:

• The use of the Ajax approach to design the site. Basically, it uses techniques similar to Google Maps and Flickr to enrich the end-user experience and improve responsiveness.
• The Question of the Week pages, which allow users to vote on the cheekiest answer to each of the oddball questions, feature Google AdSense ads. I imagine this is a great source of targetted ad revenue. For example, the ‘What’s your plot twist in, “George W. Bush: The Movie?”’ question features various ads for (anti-)Bush merchandise. Lots of specific ads + lots of impressions -> lots of ad clicks -> lots of $$$. All for the cost of posting a stupid question.