sarahcpr

When a single friend recently asked me if he should get onto Match.com or Yahoo! Personals to try to meet someone, I told him to check out Facebook instead. Yes, Facebook. My sincere apologies to Yahoo! Personals, but the fact is, social networks and online communities not only seem better equipped to help you find a match, they also don’t make you feel as creepy when you’re filling out your profile.

When it comes to online dating sites, I’m probably one of the most experienced people out there (I mean with the actual sites). After over five years of trying pretty much everything out there, I knew exactly where to look for what and how to do it. I knew that I’d get a hundred emails a day on Match.com but that I’d find almost none of them interesting, and I knew that I probably wouldn’t get many emails on The Onion Personals but that almost all of them would be closer to what I wanted. My dating profiles were so ubiquitous that on at least 4 occasions, I had people approach me randomly at a club or in a restaurant because they recognized me from my photos. I even almost taught a course about online dating at a community college, but I never found the time to get the syllabus together. I think I stopped at “Lesson One: Don’t be ugly.”

What became apparent over the years was that online dating totally sucks. It sucks for many reasons but the one that stood out to me was that, no matter how much I connected with someone through their profile, email or over the phone, there was absolutely no way to predict what the face to face dynamic would be. My “about me” paragraph slowly evolved from a straightforward self-description, to an irony-laden diatribe. But in the end, I decided that no amount of black and white text could truly represent who a person is. But lucky for all you single folks out there, social networks have come with some great ways of letting users express who they are, thereby allowing some really great matches to be made. More importantly, there’s greater value in connecting with someone through shared friends or shared interests rather than just looking for a hookup - kind of like joining a knitting club to meet people, instead of trying to do it at a meat markety bar or club.

We already know that Myspace is huge for meeting people you don’t already know - their people search does a pretty good job of letting you browse profiles based on important criteria, such as status, orientation, location, age, race and, height:

Take a people search like this and combine it with any niche online community out there, and you have yourself a damn good dating site. Stumbleupon saw the dating potential of its service from the start, by allowing users to enter and search on their romantic preferences, as well as see who’s been looking at their profile. Most other online communites, however, haven’t really enabled their sites in this way. It absolutely makes sense that these sites would want to play down their ability to function as a personals site and risk being labelled that way - if you’re purely a dating site it’s very hard to engage users over a long time period. But it also seems like at least having those options available is a good idea. And even for those members who aren’t intersted in meeting new people, the ability to express that would be helpful too.

But…until they figure that out, there are workarounds that prove that almost any site can be used as a personals site. You could use Bloglines to subscribe to a location-focused RSS feed (such as the SF Real Estate For Sale on Craigslist) and see who else is subscribed to it. You could also check out events in your area on Upcoming or Last.FM and browse the profiles of members who are going. Even Yelp would be a fun place to meet new people - people that are into the same bars, restaurants or clubs you like. My advice to any saavy singles out there would be to decide what interests you most, join an online community that focuses on that, and then just try to connect with some local members. As if people aren’t already doing that…

But back to Facebook. Even though it was originally conceived as a place to connect with people you already know, I think it will eventually become the best place to meet new people if you’re single (if it hasn’t already) (and which will lead to its imminent demise). After all, even before it opened up to non-students, it was essentially a really powerful flirting engine. Facebook is even better for us older folks now - with the Neighborhoods application you can see who lives right in your neighborhood, and then break the ice with a poke or gift or whatever.

But beyond what you actually share about yourself on your profile, social networking sites like Facebook have so much information that could be used to create great matches. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if we could match people based on the shape of their social networks? Matching members with large, loose networks and those with tight-knit ones - perhaps even creating a nifty friend wheel to show your network similiarity. Or what if you could designate the members of your network that you used to date and receive dating recommendations based on their profiles? You could also match people not just based on their interests, but the interests of their friends, what gifts they’ve given or received, how often they log in, how many pictures they’ve posted…the list could go on and on. I think this combination of explicit and implict user actions would come much closer to representing who that person is than any paragraph of text ever could. And hopefully these online actions could more accurately predict what that offline dynamic would be.