With the economy in general down-turn and the consequent drop in advertising spend, we joked with a client last night that they should look at investing in bingo, dieting or dating, even though it’s pretty far from their usual business. So I’m not altogether surprised to hear that Penguin Books have got into dating.

Like many others, I’ve been watching Penguin’s development online with interest and have been impressed by their willingness to slough off the ‘dusty’ publisher reputation to experiment with some very novel (ahem) ideas like the One Million Penguins wiki-novel (which seems to have suffered an attack from an anti-virus software provider so I can’t link to it), the spy novel Google maps mash-up We Tell Stories or their crowd controlled site for young readers: Spinebreakers.

I haven’t had much experience of dating sites, having been in a long-term relationship for, well, a long time. But in the interests of science or something, I briefly checked out PenguinDating - Penguin Books’ collaboration with Match.com.

You can find a like-minded soul who reads the same books and authors as you, but it’s a very small part of the profile and is hidden way down the page. If I were a bookish type trying out online dating for the first time under the auspices of my favourite publisher, I’d want there to be a bit more emphasis on the literary stuff. Once you get past the home page, it’s a match.com i-frame headed up by PenguinDating. Partnering with match.com makes clear commercial sense, but the collaboration would have more weight with users if the user experience and expectation had been given more prominence and TLC. A little bit of custom service design to adapt match.com for the Penguin audience would make a big difference.

If finding a match is as confusing as the navigation (why does the PenguinDating logo link back to the Penguin UK home page?), you’ll have finished A la recherche du temps perdu by the time you find someone.