Something I’ve always wanted to see at those online dating sites is a true visual compatibility engine (women, I apologize in advance for any of you that will flame this post as being sexist, chauvinistic, or heaven help me misogynistic. But some of us men are visual some of you women might be to ).

Apologies for the digression.

If a (male OR female) user were to be at the site searching around looking at profiles of potentially interesting mates, why not extend the survey engine into those profile pages as well to better take advantage of the page view the user is performing anyway? This is how I’d see it going:
1. Hit the LikeLoveOrHate.com site. Sign up, register, login in, all that jazz.
2. After finishing your personal profile (and for heavens sake, don’t require the user to sit there for 90 hours to answer those 481 interests, but allow it to simply be an ongoing process), you have the ability to do some searches for whatever it is you might want to find similarities. And don’t forget that there might also be potential business applications for licensing out this ChoicEngine technology.
3. To stay with Steve’s focus, the user is going to search for their type of potential mate. Criteria entered, search submitted, results returned.
4. If you have spent any time at yahoo personals or match.com or any of the other sites (including the mySpaces of the world) profiles now a days have photos of the profile owners. Usually just about as many as the site admin allows a profile to have.
5. If the user is at that page, anyway, why not develop an aspect of the ChoicEngine that will somehow allow for visual choices in addition to answering questions that are check box/radio button answers. It’s all data, right?
6. User has their own preferences as to what visually attracts them. Blonde, Brunette, Redhead, etc. Tall, short, thin, full figured, etc. Maybe other visual elements like freckles, coarse hair. As the user sees any of these elements in the profiles he is able to tag that image and an Ajaxy sort of drop down dynamically occurs when the mouse is passed over with a check boxed list of the attributes that the user likes. After seeing one or more of those attributes in the photo, along with a text input to record something new that might not be on the users previously recorded list, say piercings, the ajax form is submitted, and now we’ve begun to create a “Visual Digital Tag” that will produce mounds of data to help in the matching process.
7. Now as the user begins to build up their preferences, and is traveling around the Net, they hit a site which is LikeLoveOrHate.com enabled (much like http://coComment.com or on this site, the myBlogLog.com sidebar that marks my visit here). The Web 2.0 stuff in the background goes and checks the LLorH database and does an on the fly comparison of the site visitor to the site owner.
8. Or if the visitor hits a community/social networking site, the comparison would be of the visitor to the community member’s profile that they are visiting with that page view.
9. Like match.com’s regular emails suggesting potential matches, the more a LLorH user interacts with the system, the better those matching emails will become.
10. And don’t forget that this ChoicEngine concept is applicable to WAY MORE than just helping find one a soul mate (but if we could get this kick started soon, I could cancel my match.com account and be a founding LLorH’er .

I could be wrong, but…