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Priceless.

# Posted By Scott Stroz | 10/21/05 7:57 AM

MSN has an outsource agreement with Match.com to deliver personals. On MSN.com and on MSN.co.uk Match uses their originally developed app. In 2001 Match started to look at non-English markets and discovered an Australian company called Soulmates Technology who had created a multi-lingual ASP personals app which was already running personals for MSN in 18 non English domains. Match.com (NASDAQ:IACI) bought Soulmates Technology for US$24M in early 2002. Soulmates was founded by Martin Haynes and Daniel Haigh and they met at the CFUG meeting in Sydney in 1998! What you are seeing is the Soulmates Technology developed app, written in CF and supported and maintained by Match.com

# Posted By Nick McNaughton | 10/24/05 1:34 AM

Until about Aug 2004, all development, support, and R&D for the international sites, including member to member email processing, scam filtering, and Matchfinder bulk emails was done at Soulmates in Sydney Australia. This ran over 200 domains including partner sites (Tiscali, Erasmas, Buildt-T-Online, MSN etc) + Match branded sites, in 22 languages, and 32 currencies, globally. All websites ran Cold Fusion on Win, with member communication & bouncehandling in Python on Linux. Supported languages included Japanese, Korean, both Traditional & Simplified Chinese character sets, as well as all the "easy" European languages. Most recent addition was Czech. Soulmates also ran the global helpdesk from Sydney, with staff fluent in 22 languages. This system was one of the highest traffic sites in the world, and we occassionally throttled back our mail systems voluntarily if hotmail or yahoo could not keep pace with 11 million emails per week. To the best of our knowledge it was the biggest ColdFusion site in the world, with 17 million registered users, plus countless more casual visitors.

Meanwhile the good old boys in Dallas at Match.com ran USA and English-speaking Canada in 1 language only. In 2004, Soulmates Sydney was responsible for French-speaking Canada, and also for several Hispanic sites located in USA. At one time Soulmates also ran the UK sites in English, but Dallas finally worked out how to change the date format. :)

In Aug 2004 Match.com decided to relocate all development to Dallas, leaving only the multilingual helpdesk in Sydney.
Since that time they appear to have lost the contract with NineMSN here in Australia to RSVP.

# Posted By Brian Martin | 12/6/06 8:49 PM

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MSN Spain Running ColdFusion MX