I haven’t admitted before that one of the reasons I came to work at Yahoo! Personals last year is because I’m an online dater. But it’s true. I am and, as the developers like to say, I eat my own dog food.

So I’m thrilled, both as the product lead for these efforts and as an online dater, by Yahoo! Personals’ release of a set of great new photos features. The photos upgrade that’s now live on our service offers daters — those searching for a date and those creating a profile — great ease of use. The features support users’ discovery and self-expression while being fun and kind of entertaining.

The product marketing story is that Yahoo! Personals users can now add up to 10 photos to their profiles (up from 5 previously), upload photos from multiple file formats (it’s been only JPEG since our initial launch in 2003), and add captions of unlimited length. In addition, all our captions are completely searchable, enabling photo captioning to feed right into search and keyword search as a discovery tool.

These features are incredibly important to dating — our research shows that a photo increases daters’ success by more than 8x. With these new features, Yahoo! Personals offers customers more photo capabilities than any other player in our space. And all captions and photos are reviewed by customer care agents before they go live — in keeping with the safety and security commitment on-line daters expect and demand.

What the online daters who use the service can’t see is that the new features sit on a platform upgrade that’s been in the works for more than a year. We couldn’t have scaled to the ability to accept up to 100,000 new profiles per week (and with 10 times the photos, plus the new elements of captions, that’s a lot of scale) without a new Oracle back end for search, new servers, and a blazing efficient datamap. With this new infrastructure powering search, photos, and the query requests, we can create a new front end experience that takes advantage of Ajax, JSON and PHP to create a Web 2.0-informed environment.

From an online dater’s perspective (that dog food thing again), the new photos features gives me a chance to annotate and label the pictures I put up (as in “that cute child in the photo isn’t mine—he’s my nephew”) and to use our newly enhanced keyword search to find people who label their photos with things that interest me — like comments about that trip to Burning Man or a wine tasting weekend in Paso Robles. I know my dating friends are going to like these features — and we’re going to have a much more vibrant, interesting service because of them.

Of course, one of the things that has me most jazzed is that this is just one in a series of feature releases we have planned for 2007. My team and I are looking forward to releasing all the expressive, fun-to-use features and services we’ve planned for the rest of the year — and making sure our profile and search features have the authenticity, resonance, and ease-of-use online daters crave.

We’ve pulled together a 90-second home-grown video (oh-so-very chic!) to give you a quick glimpse into the lives of real people using the site and a better understanding of how this all works.

Susan Mernit
Senior Director, Product, Yahoo! Personals

Photo from josh_goodman