Today's Joy Of Tech cartoon has Steve Jobs heckling the audience, complaining that they sit around all day obsessing about Apple and to go get a life. The punch line is that an audience member thinks that reading between the lines of Jobs' speech that Apple is going to start a dating service.

Chances of this happening are as close to zero as you can get, but it got me thinking about what an Apple dating service would look like.

It would no doubt be one of the best looking dating/social networking sites out there. Lean, clean, engaging and intuitive. It would be expensive, and worth every penny. It would never crash. It would have zealots, pundits and evangelists. Every visit to the site would make you smile. Everyone on it would be passionate about dating. Members would help each other out, answering questions, connecting people and making the environment as safe and fun as possible.

Imagine getting your latest matches in iTunes. Say goodbye to the stigma of online dating once and for all.

The primary difference between the Apple dating site and the rest of the industry would be the open profiles. When can I subscribe to my dating feed like I do my news feeds? Apple would own them but they would be freely hacked and remixed. It looked like Yahoo Personals was going to roll out RSS features so I could do this myself. I'm still waiting. Some smaller sites are experimenting with RSS feeds, but there needs to be a big player to take the first step, then everyone else will likely follow suit.

The walled garden approach to dating sites makes more money for dating sites for the time being but it is not doing much for the end user. With the industry running out of steam, it's time for them to set their people free and let developers come up with new innovative features, much like Amazon and Ebay have done. They make more money by opening up their databases than they would have keeping them closed.

Personality testing had it's day. By most accounts the results we not as encouraging as we had hoped. More incremental change, evolutionary but not revolutionary. It's time to move on. Open up those databases, build better audio/video chat applications that people actually use. Bring people closer together with dynamic real-time interactions instead of static Geocities-style web pages from 1999. That's what's going to push the next phase of online dating.

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