The IM platform, available only to paying members, expands on earlier, in-house by MatchNet, which owns AmericanSingles.com, JDate.com, Gay11.com, and FaceLink.com as well as regional versions of its properties targeting Israel, the U.K., Germany, and Australia.

The system, also hinges on the efforts of software developer Userplane, which earlier this year began offering a private-label messaging product. The newest version of that offering, in turn, draws heavily on Macromedia's new Flash MX technology, a radical revamp of the multimedia giant's Flash software.

Flash MX and its five-month-old Communication Server enable developers to craft applications that offer two-way streaming features, including video, audio, text messaging and real-time collaboration. The system ensures that audio and video are delivered in sync, and ships with pre-coded application components.

Most importantly for Los Angeles-based MatchNet, the system serves its applications through the Flash Player, which Macromedia estimates is resident in more than 90 percent of all Web users' browsers. Another boon: the Flash Player and the user's OS handle Webcam and microphone interfaces, freeing application developers from having to cope with a second area of potential headaches.

As a result, the Flash Player's wide availability and built-in multimedia capabilities are expected to solve many of the issues that had been plaguing the publisher's earlier efforts at offering paid instant messaging.

"A while ago we had a version of IM that was purely HTML and JavaScript," said Peter Voutov, chief technology officer at MatchNet. "It wasn't used for a very long time. It wasn't instantaneous -- you had to refresh every so often to see if the server had new messages -- so it wasn't as gratifying as using a downloadable IM product from AOL or MSN."

The company then experimented with a Java-based client that would keep an IM connection open. But because of concerns including Microsoft's support for Java in Windows XP and cross-platform compatibility, the experience again left a lot to be desired.

"It was a plain interface, not a lot of buttons, and a lot of people joked around in chat rooms that this was 'old school chat,'" Voutov said. "You don't want to be labeled 'old school chat' -- we're pretty cutting-edge elsewhere on the sites.

"With Flash, we can build a very nice user interface, and it's very powerful in terms of connecting to a communications server, and allows you to share not just text, but voice and video," he said. "These are things we could have done in Java, but it was a losing proposition -- different versions, different browsers, and we had to give people instructions on how to enable it."

In addition to the main feature of sharing video, Los Angeles-based Userplane is adding features including animated actions (such as blowing a cartoon-like kiss) and skins. The developer also is working to beef up the Communications Server's ability to deliver potentially thousands of simultaneous streams (AmericanSingles, MatchNet's largest site, claims more than 5 million users).

"The Flash Communication Server doesn't have any automatic load balancing -- we had to build-in awareness of other servers and routers," Userplane CTO Nate Thelen said.

Displayed in a pop-up window, the client resembles a typical IM interface, with spaces for typing and for viewing the other's responses. But unlike most clients on the market, text and buttons appear slickly anti-aliased, thanks to the product's grounding in Flash. Streamed video appears in the upper right-hand corner of a window, while a user can also opt to view their Webcam's output on-screen as well.

The partners plan to launch a trial run of the service on one of MatchNet's smaller sites before the end of the year.

"We just need to measure many different things -- the increase in bandwidth for video, and the way the Flash Communications server behaves," Voutov said. "But I won't be surprised to see it go well."

Once the system is up and running on its in-house servers, MatchNet is banking that the offering will build user excitement and increase conversion rates for non-paying customers, while also boosting its properties' profile in the crowded space of online dating sites -- a sector dominated by the likes of USA Interactive's Match.com, Yahoo! Personals, and UDate.com.

"We feel IM is a very important tool in community-building, and the more ways we find to connect people, the better our system will become," Voutov said. "The IM product is a very successful way to get in touch. It will help people feel better about getting online and becoming easier to connect with. They won't have to deal with a bunch of different clients -- they'll just come to our site, log in, and it works."

Spending was not disclosed in the effort, but the project is believed to be one of the largest Flash Communication Server MX deployments to date.

The effort represents the latest IM work for Userplane, which, prior to Flash MX's built-in streaming features and pre-coded components, had been forced to do much of its own development on the back end for supporting Flash-based IM Products.

In May, the company deployed a Java and XML solution for another dating play, AmIHot.com.

"Originally, the only way to do an instant messenger was using Flash 5 XML sockets," Thelen said. "We wrote a custom Java back-end that took care of all the communications ... Once the Communications Server came out, it did pretty much everything our Java back-end did, and more, and it got us really excited."

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.