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Online dating services promise you help finding your "perfect match." Complete your profile, answer a series of questions, choose a few filters as you search and you're given a list of singles in your area who are most likely to be a suitable date.

But providing these search results is no easy task. It isn't simply a matter of identifying the right people based on a single user's dating criteria. The people whose profiles are returned in the results should also, in turn, "like" the person who's searching. In other words, the matching has to occur at both ends.

Today at the opening keynote of OSCON's new Data sub-conference, OKCupid's CTO Tom Quisel spoke about how the online dating service has built its architecture in order to handle these queries. As Quisel notes, the types of searches that OKCupid users conduct are different than those done via other search engines. After all, "Web pages don't have personal preferences."

TameJs is an extension to JavaScript created by the OK Cupid team. Its purpose is to make event programming "easier to write, read, and edit." It can be used with Node.js or other V8 projects. According to the site: "Tame is not an attempt to dumb down async programming. It's just a cleaner way to write it."

You can find it in GitHub, licensed under the MIT license.

The two largest startup ecosystems within the United States are arguably Silicon Valley and New York City, but there's a whole lot of land between the east and west coast. Smack dab in the middle of the country is Chicago, and not long ago we told you about a demo contest hosted by venture consulting firm midVentures that brought a bit of TechCrunch50 flair to the Windy City. This September, the firm is hosting another event in Chicago that looks to be the largest startup conference in the Midwest.

Siri - an iPhone application that uses its speech recognition technology to act as a mobile personal assistant that was purchased by Apple earlier this year - is an excellent case study in how to leverage open APIs to satiate utilitarian consumer needs. So why don't more marketers create open APIs and allow others to create enjoyable consumer experiences?

As Tim Berners-Lee says, we now live on a Web of data rather than a Web of documents. Companies are currently sitting on piles and piles of data. While all of this data is useful to someone, a company's management team will traditionally balk at the chance to share data, even if it's non-personally identifiable data. Executives often do not see a direct correlation between their company's vitality and sharing their information with the world.

According to a recent study conducted by dating website OKCupid, "Black women are sweethearts... white men are sh*tty," and white people in general are a horrible bunch of xenophobes.

The company recently ran some numbers on response rates for messages sent between almost a million otherwise compatible men and women of varying races, and the results are eye-opening. "Whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same," the related blog post reads. "However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved."

Don't pour your soul out into an email, don't send an online mix tape and whatever you do, don't write any poems longer than a limerick or a haiku. According to popular dating site OK Cupid, only 32% of dating site messages receive a response. Of the successful efforts, the majority of first contact messages are brief. The ideal message length from men to women is between 200-300 characters and from women to men it's a mere 50 characters. This doesn't bode well for chatty romantics, but power Twitter users may find themselves in their element.