DISQUS

Yup, we get this from time to time. We eliminate them as soon as we find them and usually mainstream users report then fairly fast. If it gets worse we just block the IP for an entire country.

Could you mail me with this woman's flirtname so we can lose her? I'm Mark@flirtomatic.com.

Yes - we were aware of the issues. Are you still getting them Anthony? there were some fixes on Friday....

And yes we know about the scammers too. They come from "overseas" if that's not too old-fashioned a term....We try to move fast to close them down. Interestingly if we were not on web as well as mobile we might not get the issue, sigh. Good idea to remind the community that they can report them.

VERY. We are also thinking long and hard about user segmentation now. It's been clear for a while that users have different "missions', and we need to get better at meeting these. How we handle the entry point and branding (is flirt the right brand?) is the issue.

Thanks for this Anthony - yup very aware of the wap issue: it's actually just hit the top slot on our priority list. Expect a fix shortly.

The scary blokes issue on web is interesting too: it's down to the fact that the interface is v different on web and wap for the "Look At Me" feature. We can show the whole thing in one go on web, but on wap split it into channels by sex. Your comment makes me think we may wish to do the same thing on web.........

Thanks for the kinds words about Flirtomatic. You're right - cheap or free data would massively increase usage. Customers ARE concerned about cost. But it is not realistic to expect advertisers/services to pay because:
- it's hard enough to make money anyway in mobile: this would strangle innovation at birth
- the equation would punish services for high usage which is illogical
- in most other content media co-funded by ads the consumer is willing to accept the cost of distribution (except radio and terrestrial TV - and even that is changing with sky/cable/the internet: so why should mobile be any different?) (oh yes and the new wave of free London papers but they are bleeding money and do not look like a sustainable proposition)

Hi - I run Flirtomatic. A couple of comments:
1. yes we are wap/xhtml NOT java: we ditched that in 2005 before launch
2. address book cannot be accessed from a browser on any phone that I know of...possibly on the iPhone (we'll know shortly). The APIs are there for java apps but I'd rather eat my hat than launch a java app.
3. zero marginal cost distribution: yes very web 2.0 but this is not the web and the two key elements of viral are not in place viz a) free messaging (email is free, sms not) and b) access to the address book (see above). Expect businesses to grow through clever marketing but viral mobile is ley to be cracked
4. spot on re the independence from operators: it is the right philosophy BUT their portals still control the majority of mobile internet traffic
Get it right....and the users are out there...we had 51,000 unique mobile users in December consuming 118m pages.....