.Dating

Timewasters???

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Sat, 24 May 2008 08:21:00 +0000

One thing I see in a lot of profiles on dating sites: statements that 'time wasters' need not apply. Seems sensible. Who would want to waste their time? But then, who really considers themselves a time waster? Can you imagine the profile?

Hi, I'm a nice, decent guy. My hobbies are riding my bike, going to the movies and wasting people's time.

Get real people. No one tries to waste people's time. Most people start out with the best of intentions and then find they've made a mistake. And even when they haven't been exactly mistaken? Who among us has not had a rebound relationship. I can't imagine a bigger waste of the other person's time. But it happens. We tell ourselves it won't, we convince ourselves our intentions are pure, but they're not.

I guess I have two almost contradictory ideas here. On the one hand, no one tries to be a time waster and there is, in effect, no such thing. On the other, everyone actually is a time waster at least some of the time.

A Funny Thing

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:16:00 +0000

Not sure exactly why, but my profile has suddenly begun to be viewed on match.com.

Now if I were a more paranoid person than I am, I might think that has something to do with the fact that I canceled my subscription a couple of weeks ago and am now letting it run out (I must have bought a special deal cause it runs till July).

But I also wrote a new profile and experimented with key word stuffing. I used the words love, lovely, relationship over and over again, I even explained that was what I was doing. Lo and behold, I moved up the ranks and suddenly a lot of people are viewing me.

I re-wrote it again and did not use the stuffing. I'll be interested to see if it drops a bit.

Must be Seen to Be Believed

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:08:00 +0000

This is from the match.com faq:

Q. How do I purchase the Make Love Happen Guarantee program?
A. It's easy! Simply subscribe today and choose the six-month Love package. To learn more about the program, please read our program rules. If you have not met someone special after 6 months and followed all the program rules, you will qualify for the Love extension at no additional expense to you.

Q. What's included in the six-month Love package?

Q. What's included in the six-month Love package?
A. The six-month Love package provides all the benefits that Subscribers to the Match.com service receive as part of a six-month subscription. See Match.com Terms of Use for details. Additional features like MindFindBind™ and MatchTalk™ are available at an additional cost, and you will continue to be billed for any features you add to your subscription, even during a free extension of your subscription under the Make Love Happen program. See Match.com FAQ and How It Works for further details about additional features you can enjoy during your subscription.

MindFindBind???

Adult Dating Site

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:41:00 +0000

I'm trying a new tack. Since last weekend I've been on Adult Friend Finder. I went on for a few different reasons. The most obvious one hardly bears mentioning. But I found some interesting things once I started reading the profiles. Quite a few just have a little textspeak essentially demanding shags like, NOW. But quite a few other people are looking for a wide variety of things. Relationships of one kind or another where sex is an important part, but not all and not just once or twice.

This is a big change from the marriage-driven approach you see on the dotdating corporate sites I've been looking at. Yes, in the end I expect to get some good no strings attached shagging out of this. But I may well find some other interesting experiences along the way.

I think at least that this site is more honest about what it offers. People looking to simply hook up. Interestingly, the fact that it drops all the corporate cleanliness means people's profiles are much more honest and liberated. And interesting to read. No more of the endless 'I like going out and staying in with a bottle of red wine and a DVD' lines.

Your Face May Tell People What Kind Of Relationship You Seek

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:51:00 +0000

Your Face May Tell People What Kind Of Relationship You Seek

Whether you are looking for a long-term relationship or just a one-night stand may be written on your face for others to read, say researchers from Durham University (England), St. Andrews University (Scotland) and Aberdeen University (Scotland).

You can read about this study in Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Apparently, a man who has a large nose, small eyes and a square jaw gives out signals of being the type of person who would prefer a short-term encounter, rather than love. According to women, men with softer features are more likely to be after a long-term relationship.

Even though researchers found that men do seem able to identify women who are fancy-free, they could not specific which particular part of the face was responsible for this.

The study involved 700 young heterosexual adults, all in their twenties.

In one of the studies involving 153 people, 72% of them were able to identify accurately the sexual attitudes of men and women just by looking at photographs of their faces.

Women who seek short-term sexual relationships generally have wide eyes and large lips - men tend to find these types of women more attractive.

Men who give the appearance of preferring a long-term relationship are more sought after by women, the study found. The more 'masculine' a man is the less likely he is to be faithful and a good parent, women tend to think - this finding agrees with those of previous studies.

Surprisingly, both men and women generally go for people who are the opposite of themselves.

Team member, Dr. Lynda Bothered, Durham University, said that the initial impressions we get from looking at a person's face could be part of how we assess potential mates (or rivals) when we fist meet them. "These will then give way over time to more in-depth knowledge of that person as you get to know them better, and may change with age," Bothered added.

"Facial correlates of sociosexuality"
Lynda G. Boothroyd, Benedict C. Jones, D. Michael Burt, Lisa M. DeBruine, David I. Perrett
Evolution & Human Behavior - 27 March 2008 (10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.12.009)
Click here to view abstract online

Written by - Christian Nordqvist
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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Cancellation Message on Match.com

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:32:00 +0000

They asked for one, so I gave it. The question was, 'Can you suggest a way we can make it easier to find love?'

You can't. Finding love has never been easy and it has never been done in writing. Imagine Romeo and Juliet on match.com. Never would have happened. Romeo would have taken one look at her profile, figured she was from the family of his enemies and that would have been that. Of course he would have been better off....

The important things that happen between people do not involve words and can not be preceded by words, especially written ones. I suspect that the whole concept of online dating as it exists on these sites is either doomed to fail altogether or else likely to replace the old romantic notions of love with serial dating. Perhaps, like our online Romeo, we'll all be better off that way.

Anyway, the damn thing doesn't expire till July, so I guess I still have time to 'make love happen'.

Dot Dating Corporations

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:38:00 +0000

Like any other business, dot dating corporations seek to capitalise on something. It would seem these guys capitalise on people's natural need to get together with partners, to get married in whatever form that takes. People desire that, the companies provide it.

Sometimes, though, I can't help feeling that actually they capitalise on people's hopes that the old way isn't fading out of existence.

The Written Intro

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:37:00 +0000

Every corporate dot dating site provides you with a text field for entering a 'long' description of yourself the indexing, searching and ultimate reading of which is supposed to be superior to the 'old-fashioned' ways in which people used to meet each other.

I have found over the years that it is damn hard at best to meet people with these things. There are so many qualities that just don't come across in spoken words, much less written ones.

How many people do you meet at a party for example by exchanging what amounts to a knowing glance? I can think of several different times in my life when I just looked at a woman and somehow we knew something was going to happen because of the way she was simultaneously looking at me. And I don't just mean fucking here.

Now what is the written equivalent of that?

A Dating Site for Cheating Married People

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:32:00 +0000

Studies indicate up to 30% of those people using on-line dating services are married. Why not join a site specifically designed for you? With marriedsecrets.com, there's:

No excuses
No explanations

... just great people waiting to meet you.

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Almost too painful to watch (but funny)

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:34:00 +0000

If you've EVER done any online dating, you may find this as agonising as I did.

Scamski city, where online 'Russian brides' turn out to be Mafia conmen

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:45:00 +0000

Scamski city, where online 'Russian brides' turn out to be Mafia conmen

One remote city and so many beautiful women, all desiring nothing more than to fire the passion of British men.

Our pictures below show some of the stunning Russian ladies who have offered themselves on dating and marriage websites recently.

All of them hail from the far-flung outpost of Yoshkar-Ola, close to the Ural Mountains.

One willowy beauty is a hard-up nurse who is desperate to leave her impoverished homeland and start a new life with a man in the West.

Russian doll: Stolen pictures of pop star Alsou were used by the conmen

Another is a medical student, though she more closely resembles a nymph-like model from the pages of a glossy magazine.

And a third is a glamorous 23-year-old who calls herself "Anna Safina".

In an email to one British man, Anna wrote: "I wish I could be with you. I'm sure that together we will have a lot of fun and spend great time!

"I'm very caring person and loving, I will do for you everything to make you feel good.

"I want to wake up in the morning early and prepare food for you. I want to meet you in the evening when you come from your work and kiss you tender, to hold you and to show you all my love."

It sounded just too good to be true and, of course, it was. In reality, "Anna" was part of a scam masterminded in Yoshkar-Ola, the scale of which was revealed last week to The Mail on Sunday by the FSB, the Russian secret service, after a series of raids.

Thousands of people, including many lonely and gullible British men, have lost large amounts of money after entering into correspondence with women on websites, naively beguiled by their warm words, suggestive chat and the sexy pictures they attach to their emails.

When they were asked to send money, which the women claimed was needed for British visas or to buy tickets for travel to Britain, the men readily agreed.

They never saw the money or heard from the women again.

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Swoop: Internet scam suspects held during a Russian secret service raid in Yoshkar-Ola

In a final humiliating twist, they found out, usually far too late, that many of the sensuous "women" with whom they had been corresponding were actually men - part of one of the many sinister Russian mafia rings making a fortune out of such scams.

In one case, a member of a gang posed as a nurse using a photograph of the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet dancer Anastasia Volochkova.

One professional British man was so taken with the photograph that he sent "her" several thousand pounds, spurred on by a sob story from the nurse about her disabled mother who needed nursing care while she came to visit him in Britain.

When he discovered the truth, he was too embarrassed to contact the police.

According to investigators, the same photograph was also used to ensnare a 45-year-old German construction worker called Friedrich Deichmann, who eventually parted with €26,000 (£21,500).

In this case, the gang used a team of female students, fluent in English, to write to him and even chat on the phone, pretending to be besotted with him.

Two of the men behind this particular scam - Sergey Chetverikov, 22, and Oleg Yelsukov, 24 - have now been brought to justice and are serving three years in prison.

But with the returns that can be made on these scams, the pair are likely to be back at work as soon as they get parole.

No other business pays as well in this grim backwater.

Volochkova herself, who left the Bolshoi Ballet in 2003, is now happily married in Moscow and horrified at her pictures being used by the scammers.

Fantasy: Glamorous 23-year-old 'Anna Safina' promises 'to do everything to make you feel good'. Really 'she' was conman Oleg Yelsukov, below, now in jail. The photo was actually of Alsou, a Russian pop star and daughter of an oil tycoon

"I was enraged that my photograph served the rotten purposes of these swindlers," she said.

"I wanted to take action myself at first when I discovered the scam.

"But then I realised our law-enforcement bodies could do it far better than me.

"This is my advice: those who prefer virtual romances should be much more prudent. You simply can't be as unsuspecting as some of these men.

"This sordid business has recently seen a rapid growth in our country, with a great number of fake sites appearing on the web.

"People are striving to find their 'other half' and these crooks are like parasites on their feelings and hopes.

"I'm glad these swindlers were arrested. First of all, €26,000 is a lot of money.

"Second, I can easily imagine how upset the man, who transferred the money was. He had certain hopes which were ruined in the lowest way."

Another photograph used by the scammers was that of the Russian singer Alsou, the daughter of a wealthy oil tycoon, who has a penthouse in London and is also happily married.

Her pictures were simply ripped off and she was dubbed "Anna Safina".

The capital of the Mari-El republic, Yoshkar-Ola, is 500 miles east of Moscow and is still suffering from the collapse of its manufacturing industry after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

Today it is estimated that as many as one in 100 residents in the city is involved in dating scams.

No wonder this new industry is said to be worth an incredible £40-£ 50 million a year to the city.

One fraudster, who poses as an attractive blonde called Anna Ivanova, said: "The average salary in my city is £75 a month.

"The choice here is simple - either poverty or larceny. Now I earn £3,000 a month.

"People are fools if they want to find a wife on the internet.

"It is not real. I correspond with a whole division of Westerners - and they are all idiots.

"And I am quite successful in the business. I can wait to be noble and honest in my next life."

In one case, a dozen British men were fooled by a picture of a model talking on the telephone while sitting on a bed.

One of the names she was given was "Natasha Ivanova".

After complaints to the police, they discovered to their shame that they were being sweet-talked on the web by a beefy, 6ft 4in Cameroonian medical student named Nde Saninong.

The 28-year-old was earning some extra money for his classes at university in Russia.

After the matter was reported to Russian police, he was jailed.

One 45-year-old from London, who wanted to remain anonymous, explained how he fell into the trap.

"I met a woman through the internet. She had a lovely photo, which I now know was taken from a modelling agency brochure.

"I later found they were using the same pictures under a number of different aliases.

"I wrote back a few times, she gradually became warmer and eventually announced she wanted to come over and see me.

"Foolishly, I sent her money for a visa and an air fare and I never heard from her again."

The story is amazingly common.

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Fantasy: A beautiful blonde nurse looking for love in the West. Actually 'her' suitors were sending love notes to mafia thug Sergey Chetverikov, below. The girl in the photo is actually ballerina AnastasiaVolochkova

Matt Collins, a 46-year-old detective constable, explained candidly how he had sought a relationship on the internet but quickly became suspicious of a young woman who took a sudden interest in him. Her name was "Kristina Budrjashowa".

"I subscribe to a dating website and in January I received an email from 'Kristina' claiming we had made contact on the site," he said.

"I had no recollection of this contact. She stated she was in the process of seeking to come to England and looking for someone to have a meaningful relationship with.

"Three pictures of a stunning girl accompanied this message."

Although at times her grasp of English was shaky, her enthusiasm could not be faulted: "I'm a lucky girl to meet such good man as you in internet!" she cooed.

"Almost all Russian men are like bears! They are so rude, they can't be nice and polite, they don't want to have a family. I think you are not like them."

She asked if she could stay with him when she came to Britain.

The tacky pattern of conversation is used over and over again by the gangs, often changing nothing more than the name of the man they're conning.

Yet it works, repeatedly, and the money keeps rolling in.

"I have a question," asked Kristina suggestively. "Is it normal if we will like each other may be it is possible to live together?

"Of course if you or somebody doesn't mind. Do you have a big wide bed? (joke)."

Collins said: "I played along with her continued correspondence, through the pretence of her last day at work in Russia, her making plans to travel to England and her telling her family and friends what a wonderful man I was.

"Five days after she first made contact with me, she said she was on her way to Moscow in order to sort out her travel documents.

"She said she planned to fly to England and would be in touch the next day to pass on her travel plans.

"At this stage she had asked for nothing from me, but I guessed what was about to happen."

Surfing through the multitude of dating sites, Collins had found the same woman on another site, but with a different name.

"This 'Kristina Budrjashowa' was even pictured clutching the same cuddly toy as a woman called 'Karina Zoubayrowa,'" he said.

"I was just waiting for the request for the money. I didn't have to wait long. It arrived later the same day."

Wisely, Collins sent "Kristina" a fake reference number to use at a Western Union transfer office.

Kristina never received a penny and broke off contact with him completely.

In another case a Heathrow security worker was forced to barricade himself into his Russian holiday apartment as furious gang members demanded he pay up.

Basil Dalrymple, a 32-year-old from Lewisham, South-East London, had been seduced online by blonde and blue-eyed Irina Zenchenko after paying £70 to an agency called Euro-contacts. He even travelled to Yoshkar-Ola to meet her.

Surprisingly perhaps, this Irina really did exist - but her intentions were far from honourable.

Soon after Dalrymple arrived, she demanded he pay £500 for a trip to Sochi on the Black Sea coast.

"I wouldn't hand over the money," said Dalrymple.

"Eventually these men turned up at my holiday apartment banging on the door and demanding in Russian that I pay up.

"Then her father came back on his own and was shouting through the door. I got out of there as fast as I could."

At any one time it is estimated that Yoshkar-Ola has up to 500 scamming "offices" - mostly situated in rented flats fitted with banks of computers and a satellite link for high-speed internet connections.

Scroll down for more...

The fantasy: 'Natasha Ivanova' promises love in return for a ticket to London. But in reality 'she' was 6ft 4in medical student from Cameroon. The picture was stolen from an advert

"There's a good atmosphere, like in any office where we're fighting to get as many deals as we can to raise the commission payments," said Pyotr, a brash 29-year-old who supports two children from his income.

"In my office there is me and another guy directing it, and we have three girls, all students, who put the emails into good English.

"There are another couple of girls who help with the run to pick up the money when it's sent by Western Union or Moneygram.

"They're not well paid but it's better than any other job round here.

"We use their names on the sites so that they can collect the cash when it's sent, showing their passports at the bank.

"My office turns round about £15,000 a month, and we're all on commission from our bosses.

"I won't talk about them but, yes, you could say that they're mafia."

Pyotr refused to say whether, as is widely rumoured, such gangs have "friends" in the police and local government which enable them to work freely.

"The place is comfortable. We have beds and a Jacuzzi.

"Because of the time differences to Britain and the States, it makes sense for us to work through the night - but you can have breaks. We like to relax, too."

Unlike many of his fellow scammers, Pyotr avoids using celebrity pictures to lure his victims.

Instead, he copies anonymous images he finds on the internet or in glossy magazines.

"Our main targets are men from their late 30s to 50s. We offer them women in their 20s, who may hint about sex but say they're desperate for a family, but don't trust Russian men.

"They claim they're decent and religious but need to get on in their life, and this is their only chance to get to the West."

Does he feel any guilt about what he does?

"Why? These British and American men think they can exploit our women.

"Do they really think that after you've known a girl for a couple of days on the web that she's going to be lusting after you and truthfully saying, 'I love you' and 'Can I come to your bed?'

"They're pot-bellied, middle-aged fools. If they're ready to send their money, they deserve all they get."

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No romance: The grim city of Yoshkar-Ola, where date-scamming is a £50-million-a-year industry run by the Russian mafia

Natasha, 21, who speaks English and pays her way through university as a scammer, said: "It's the only work. I suppose it's not nice to fool people, but they think they can take advantage of poor Russian girls."

It seems as if everyone in this seedy city is trying to get a share of the scamming action.

Even pensioner Olga Mikhailova has joined in.

"I rent my apartment to scammers," she boasted. "They are nice guys and always pay good rent.

"Yes, it is true, our city is the capital of scammers," said Andrei, another gang member.

"Other cities have some scammers too, but we have more.

"There are so many that it is almost a legitimate business."

In one raid, staged recently by the FSB, more than 200 people were arrested, including 30 ringleaders.

They were raking in around £250,000 a month.

But despite the raid, many other gangs continue to operate, raising suspicions that the police have turned a blind eye.

"At the moment, 14 men are charged, and the investigation is still in progress," said one FSB source.

"The case is expected to go for trial this summer.

"Very often, the investigation of such cases happens after the police get a complaint from a cheated foreigner in Britain or elsewhere.

"They check the email address and arrest its owner who almost certainly turns out to be a cog in the wheel, small fry.

"Meanwhile, the arrest alerts the bosses who have time to hide all the traces of the bigger scams.

"This time we waited in order to gather more information and catch the bigger group."

Last night, the British Embassy in Moscow said that it receives at least one complaint a week from British men ripped off by marriage and dating scams in Russia.

However, it is acknowledged that the complaints are just the tip of the iceberg.

Some estimates suggest that only one man in 50 complains about the loss of money. Most are just too embarrassed to do so.

"We recorded 58 such cases last year. All were from British males who developed an internet 'relationship' with a Russian 'female'," said an embassy source.

"During the course of this online relationship, photographs would be sent and arrangements made for the female to visit the UK.

"This is when the issue of money arises, first for the visa, then for the flight, bogus Customs clearance and other spurious reasons."

British men also contact the embassy to check the validity of visas scanned and emailed by the women as proof that they are preparing to travel to the UK.

They are usually bogus.

Other men employ private detectives to check the backgrounds of women with whom they have been corresponding.

One such detective is Elena Garrett, a Russian woman who, ironically, is married to an American.

She said: "The client gives us her name, age and everything, and we come back in three days and we say, 'There is no such girl. Such girl does not exist.'"

All in all, it doesn't have much to do with love.

Additional reporting: Adam Luck in London.

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Match.com add, wouldn't it be great to be dogs

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:52:00 +0000

Match.com, the source of very strange ads comes out with this strange wish to be dogs. Is match.com saying using the site reduces you to the level of animals in heat? Sure looks like it.

In the online dating wars human love is being reduced to a commodity for sale. Which is probably what it always was.

Rednecks talk about online dating

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:49:00 +0000

Wise rednecks on online dating

Top 5 Internet Dating Tips for Geeks

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:45:00 +0000

Plenty of fish for web dating mogul

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:59:00 +0000

Plenty of fish for web dating mogul

He works two hours a day and makes as much as $10 million a year.

That's why Markus Frind is already considered a dot com legend at the ripe old age of 29.

Frind is the sole owner of PlentyOfFish.com, one of the most popular online dating sites in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.

Running his matchmaking business from his 83-square-metre apartment in downtown Vancouver, Frind is a one-man show in a business many thought was impossible to do solo.

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On the other hand....

noreply@blogger.com (dotdave) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:28:00 +0000

Not so sure about online dating any more, but then, I'm the one who's actually been doing it. There's no disputing the advantages Bob listed in his post, after all, many of them led me to the dating sites myself. And yet....

These days, when I log on, and I do still log on, I can't escape the feeling that I'm looking at shelves full of ipods: this one has 80GB, this one has a nice screen, this one costs less. Since when do we 'find love' based on features? Or maybe a better way to put it: since when do we really know what we are looking for?

For ages we've assumed that love was the most non-rational thing we did: there was no accounting for it, it just happened. Think of Romeo and Juliet. Now imagine them meeting on a dating site. Romeo would have taken one look at the profile, seen she was from the family of his enemies, and that would have been that. Arguably he would have been better off, but he also would not have fallen in love and, worse still, we wouldn't have much of a play.

Online dating sites would have us believe that love is more rational, more a matter of choice. Something we size up through comparison shopping before making a purchase.

And then there is the attitude of many of the people on the sites. Read the profiles. One after another talks about finding Mr. right, about only wanting serious relationships, not being interested in 'time wasters'. That last one is a favourite of mine. What is a 'time waster'? Presumably someone who dates you for a while and then doesn't make a commitment. But who can know? We may all start out with 'good' (read: serious) intentions. But as you get to know someone, things don't work out. So are you now a time waster?

Think about the mentality that is behind such profiles. You look at each person through one single binary prism: are they partner material?

Don't we lose something here? Aren't there other kinds of relationships that are also possible? And to the extent that one does want a partner, does it really increase the odds if we segment ourselves in one area and zero in on that one thing?

Full disclosure here: I used to think more or less that way myself. The results were painful at the time, though they strike me as kind of funny now. I remember a conversation I had with a woman I met on a site whom I ended up dating for about 6 months. Early in the relationship she asked me what I was looking for. Turned out we were both looking for the same thing: a partner. Hey great, we thought. There's a lot of work done. Now all we have to do is sit back and let nature take its course. Six months later we broke up. If we hadn't had that conversation, we probably wouldn't even have lasted that long.

6 Advantages Of Internet Dating Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (Bob and Gail) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:31:00 +0000

6 Advantages Of Internet Dating Revealed

Andrew Johnstone
March 16, 2008
We live in a very busy world these days and that probably won't be changing anytime soon. Time is precious and people have less patience than ever before and tend to want everything NOW. So how do we get on when we are single, lonely and desperate to find a partner? This is where internet dating comes into its own. There are many advantages of internet dating over more conventional ways of meeting women. Let's take a look at some advantages here…

1. The biggest advantage of all is that you save heaps of time. Once you've got a good system in place, where you have a good profile and picture, it silently works behind the scenes to bring you emails from interested women. The only time that you will need to allocate each day, is enough to reply to some emails, and to send out a few emails to women that you are interested in.

2. Meeting women online costs very little or is even free, so you save money right away. Just imagine if you were going out to bars and clubs every week, spending loads of money on your drinks AND the potential date's drinks, plus dinner in some cases, you would be spending a small fortune. You can screen potential dates online and narrow it down to the ones that you really want to go out with and spend your time and money on.

3. Most men have a fear of approaching women (which actually is a fear of rejection), but when you "approach" women online it becomes a non-issue, because you have that "safety net" that the internet offers.

4. All the initial contacts that you have with women can be done with your computer, and internet connection, from the comfort of your own home. There's no need to leave your house at all until you are ready to go out on the first date with the women you have met online.

5. People are becoming more and more cautious these days and will strive to protect their privacy at all costs. This is the beauty of online dating in that you can maintain your privacy until you trust and get to know the other person. If you're generally a shy person, you can get to know women online first and become comfortable with them before you ever meet up with them in person.

6. With internet dating, you can meet many more women online than you could ever hope to achieve at a bar, club, gym or the mall and you can interact with them all at the same time. This is a numbers game, so the more women you can talk to online, the more you can date, and the sooner you'll find the "right one" (if that's your goal).

It's pretty obvious that the advantages of internet dating over conventional dating, make it a clear winner. So what's holding you back from giving it a go? Is it the fear of ridicule from family and friends, or the stigma that still surrounds online dating? Once you learn how to do online dating effectively, you'll never look back.

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Tips To Secure Your Online Dating Safety

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:19:00 +0000

Good read for anyone online dating

Those liars who know its wrong

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:12:00 +0000

Research we have covered tells us that 25% of the community thinks telling "white lies" is okay online, but about 50% do it.

Hard to say where to come down on this. It is wrong to lie on an internet dating site. But a lot of people are lonely and desperate and likely feel they need to lie. Seeing on the women on match.com and datingdirect.com who flattly say "no bald guys" I would imagine shallowness and lies run in both directions.

Generally lies about physical size will soon enough be resolved if the two parties ever meet. From talking with friends I know that most experienced online daters have had a size shock, but its something that's clear. If I made a profile listing my weight as 145 pounds you would not be able to hold your dinner down on meeting me.

But we can only think about the big lies that are going on: marriage status, number of children, and other lies that get told later but are not on a profile like HIV status or last HIV test.

But we do live in a world of lies

Liar Liar

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:08:00 +0000

Summary: In this article we learn that that other person is probably shorter if they are a guy, almost certainly heavier, but most likely the age their profiel says.

Online Dating Persona Differs From Reality
Source

By Therese LahlouhFeb 16 2007
Skeptical about looking for love online? A new study by Prof. Jeffrey Hancock, communication and information science, and Catalina Toma grad lays out the truths and misconceptions about online dating.

Toma and Hancock decided to try a new research technique to match up the daters’ profiles to their actual appearances: they weighed them, measured their height and obtained their age from their driver’s licenses. This method differs from earlier studies because the researchers are actually taking the measurements themselves, instead of asking the participants to come clean about their measurements — or their lies.

“You can never tell if someone is telling the truth about their lies,” Hancock said.Collecting the data proved to be no easy task. It took nearly six months to recruit 80 participants from the New York City area who used the online websites Match.com, Yahoo Personals, American Singles and Webdate. Toma then had to persuade participants to get on a scale and take part in a two-hour meeting. The incentive was $30.They found that 52.6 percent of men and 39 percent of women lied about their height. In terms of weight, 64.1 percent of women and 60.5 percent of men altered reality for the virtual dating scene. Age was less of an issue, with 24.3 percent of the men and 13.1 percent of the women providing incorrect information.

“People lied a lot, but that means they lied often but not by much,” Hancock said.In most cases, height was rounded up by half an inch, and weight was rounded down between five to ten pounds. The further a person deviated from an average weight for their height, the larger the person’s lie tended to be.

Toma and Hancock discovered that while people were obviously lying to appear more appealing to the opposite sex, they also needed to be relatively honest because they expect a face-to-face meeting. The daters needed to strike a delicate balance between these two concerns in order to succeed in the online dating world.

The reasoning behind the fibs was explained in part by Toma, who defined the two main trains of thought surrounding this behavior. People want to present themselves as well as they can in order to appeal to the opposite sex. However, they are also seeking unconditional acceptance and want to be loved for who they really are.

“They are forced to balance these ideals by lying marginally, but frequently,” Toma said.The need to lie is stimulated by evolutionary behavior, according to Toma and Hancock. For example, women naturally seek the strongest man who will be able to protect and provide for the family, so taller, wealthier men are more attractive. Both men and women are in tune to the subliminal desires of the opposite sex, and alter their profiles to appeal to this primal instinct, according to Hancock.

When asked how much they had lied, “people were relatively up front about it,” Hancock said. Often there are publicized cases of gross exaggerations in online profiles, but in the long run, most of the daters’ motives were good, according to Toma.
Does this mean that online dating should be sworn off as a collection of deceptive traps? Not necessarily. When asked if he would participate in online dating after conducting this research, Hancock replied with no hesitation, “Yes, definitely.”

Still Not Everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 21:54:00 +0000

In a pub in Salsiburry this week I meet a girl who said to her friends that tehy shouldn't not let on that a woman they were going to meet had meet her new boyfriend on the internet.

Thats just so 2006.

Bob Hooker

Vision of a Perfect Dating Site

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:04:00 +0000

Things we noticed that should make a perfect site.

Firstly you want to date people near you. This site should model people by where they live, where they work and how far they travel.

Honesty should be promoted. We suspect many of the people on the dating sites looking for partners are just looking for quick fucks. I like Plenty of Fish ability to search a large body of users by specific interests. So if you want a one night stand in Plenty of Fish you can just say it.

So by applying filters one can be searching those looking for soul mates who will take 6 months to kiss, or for a one night stand. Our site would allow filters for a wide set of bonding from just friends for fast fucks, in a professional fashion. This should promote honesty since you can find people who are open and up front about what they want, and keep people with different goals away from each other.

The site would have a lot of community spaces for chats and also allow users to develop games to interact. This would promote community discovery of partners.

With a system based on collaboration and discovery, and not forms matching. This system would have less forms, which are just places to lie anyways.

Probably 5 photo requirements. Photos should be dated with a digital signature, so it would be nice if everyone had a digital camera and uploaded via that.

The site would not direct people to put in their idea match. Rather they would answer some questions which would provide a profile, not fill out fields. They would then express their goals in going on the site. From there the site would guide the users to collaborative spaces of chat rooms, online games, photosharing, and other things that would promote discovery.

So if anyone wants to hire me as an online consulting just leave a comment

Bob Hooker

More on the wine and companies and open source

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:41:00 +0000

Looking through plenty of fish I was able to do searches on wine. The plenty of fish community at this point is perhaps a little more raunchy than say Match.com, but our experience is that pay services communities tend to be too cautious and conservative so its a wash there.

So is there any reason for a wine lovers dating service? Well granted the wine lovers service has a lot more information about wine on it, with lots of articles, and lots of money on advertising and it looks nice. Perhaps its a bit over designed, you might just want to search wine on a dating site?

It comes down to corporate efforts to keep the subscriptions coming in to these services. A site like plenty of fish makes its creator a million of so dollars a year through google ads, which would be nothing compared to the massive companies that are merging around dating services which collect maybe $300 a year from member just in usage fees, and then ads, and then the ability to sell the information to marketing firms.

Of course everything on Plenty of Fish is right there for Google and Yahoo to collect. People who don't marry live shorter lives than people who do, would you want your insurance company collecting a record of your online dating over say 20 years when making a life insurance policy? Of course they can aske are you married already, but I suspect patterns of dating posts will establish a great deal more about someone that could be used to predict life span and sickness history.

But lets put the issue of data security aside.

Essentially if everyone was on something like plenty of fish, if people used tags and tag searching, and took precautions they should take with any dating site there would probably be no need for specialized sites or even pay sites. As of today I see nothing that the pay sites offer to make them worth their money AND since they are directing to the more cautious market segment with more money they tend to be full of old people who couldn't make it work in the real world for 20 years. (No offense I hope)

Chemistry.com claims to have some anthropological information to help more advance pair discovery but we can't see it yet. You have to answer a lot of questions.

The thing about plenty of fish is that it just feels low class, real low class. I am looking for open source free online dating sites that have skinned themselves a bit better and allow users to make ad on functions. Also more FILTERS. There is a need for community policing and removing of cons.

I think massive sites with tags and community areas that allow people to browse and discover are better than forms based matching sites. I am also becoming more and more suspect about how motivated professional sites are to actually developing working relationships.

But right now to be honest plenty of fish looks awful, is full on non-pictures, most of the pictures are clearly not of the people or not from this century, and the tool is not very personal. By that I mean it does not keep state information about you. For example if you search on the UK it should probably keep a state variable that you are looking to date in the UK unless told otherwise. But when you click a tag on a person it takes you to the tag poll for the entire global community. Real useful. Search is suppose to allow fine tuning, but this keeps taking you back to the top.

It also is always sending you to the US by default, the entire US. Maybe in 50 people will be dating globally but it is not happening right now.

Merger Madness Hits Online Dating

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:02:00 +0000

As online dating becomes bigger and bigger business very rapidly this story shows just how much of a business online dating now is.

PARIS (Reuters) - Continental Europe's leading online dating agency Meetic said on Monday it was close to concluding a friendly takeover of British peer, DatingDirect.

"This accord should be finalised in the course of January 2007, following the lifting of the last suspensive clauses," Meetic, which is based near Paris, said in a statement.

Meetic founder and chairman Marc Simoncini said the takeover would allow the company to enter the U.K. market without the need for an expensive

"Thanks to this acquisition we will have conquered in less than five years the leading position on most of the international markets on which we operate," Simoncini said in a statement.

The group, already present in 14 European countries and China and Brazil, planned to expand further in 2007, he added.
SOURCE

The big story in online dating is not going to be take on, and its not going to be about how unhappy people become happy via online dating, or how love and marriage is changed via the Internet. 2007 will be the year that large corporations, people like GE and Microsof start to take over the business of dating.

Maybe its time to go back to the bar.

Even ever a case for open source free dating sites could be made, its the fairly disturbing concept that MBAs from massive companies could be deciding how people are paired up soon.

technorati tags:Online, dating, DatingDirect, Merger

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Our New Mission

noreply@blogger.com (dotdating staff) — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:03:00 +0000

When we starting .dating online dating was still rather new, after all it was about 8 months ago, ages and ages on the Internet.

Our interest was as much to promote what I saw as a valid new social activity that promised to help build community as anything, certainly that was a bigger gain than any money made via adsense.

The site has been fun watching something start out small suddenly become an established part of life, and from the perspective of this blog I got to watch it happen.

But now that 25,000,000 Americans a year visit online dating sites the issue is not getting it going, its monitoring the good, bad and ugly.

So we are extending our mission to look more and more at negatives of online. When we started the negatives were simple:

1. It might not work.
2. I will meet freaks and losers.
3. Everyone will think I'm a freak or loser.

Safety was the greatest issue, as it remains so today. But new dangers are emerging:

1. Online dating sites may work to built more shallow short term relationships with the promise of always someone new in the aim of extending subscriptions. You may become less likely to find love.
2. Companies may use online dating services to collect marketing data or promote products, specifically alcohol and tobacco consumption.
3. Dating by matching does not work, we need to discover someone who has things we didn't even know we wanted. People have to learn what they are looking for in the process of meeting people, they don't just get matched up on the print out.
4. Online dating could be a form of government, business, and other jerks getting to know sensitive information about you.
5. I like Microsoft, but I don't see why companies that big have an interest in online dating.

With online dating established I am going to be a bit more critical of the trends that are going on, more social studies and less cheerleading. Online dating is here to stay, it does not need promoting but watching.