Livewire: Web Sites Try to Make Internet Dating Less Creepy – another descriptive article about Friendster

Livewire: Web Sites Try to Make Internet Dating Less Creepy
Sat July 5, 2003 04:02 PM ET
By Rachel Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For a lot of people, online dating still conjures up visions of the uncouth and unattractive trawling the Internet looking for unsuspecting singles who would never go out with them in the real world.

But a new crop of Web sites have sprung up that let you confine your search to dates with a common interest or outlook, and even lets friends weed out undesirables.

Friendster (http://www.friendster.com) lets you use your own friends to meet new people, a play on the idea of six degrees of separation that eliminates the blind date.

Instead of going online to find a beautiful stranger, online daters go to Friendster to catch up with people they might have already met or who are at least friends of friends.

Liz Hansen, a 26-year-old student in Cleveland, joined Friendster at the urging of her roommate. Not a novice when it came to meeting people online, Hansen met a guy on dating site Nerve.com (http://www.nerve.com) and they dated for a short time.

She says Friendster takes some of the tension out of online dating by vetting the prospective paramours. Since joining, she has made some new friends, but not everyone is a keeper.

“I get a decent amount of responses, a couple a week or so,” she said. “Sometimes people are a little too creepy.”

After a person joins Friendster, they invite their friends to join and those friends invite more friends, forming connections with neighbors from across the street to across the country.

Jonathan Abrams, a 33-year-old software engineer turned entrepreneur from California, came up with the idea of Friendster in 2002, after he checked out some dating Web sites but didn’t really like what he saw.

The site has only been open to the public since March and is currently free, though Abrams plans to start charging for some of the services in the next few months.

Friendster has recently been shooting up the ranks of the Web’s most popular sites. It is now the 151st most visited site among U.S. users, according to Hitwise.com (http://www.hitwise.com), a Web site measurement service that tracks the surfing habits of 10 million U.S. Internet surfers.

If you’ve already dated your way through your circle of friends, but you still have some major mate criteria, there are Web sites that can help you narrow your playing field.

WHITTLING DOWN THE DATING POOL

One way to narrow down your search for a soulmate is by religion. Jdate (http://www.jdate.com), which bills itself as the largest Jewish singles network, lets you whittle down the dating field to its almost half a million members.

The site MuslimSingles (http://www.muslimsingles.com) helps followers of Islam find each other online. It is part of GEOSingles (http://www.geosingles.com), which lets people search for potential dates by ethnicity, religion, geographic location and special interests.

Some of the sites, however, are just for straight couples and will not set up same-sex couples.

If you’re not looking for a specific religious group there is Singles with Scruples (http://www.singleswithscruples.com), which says it is “a nondenominational site designed to attract people of sound character and high ethics.” It’s only for male-female relationship seekers, however.

Vegetarians can steam it up with like-minded herbivores on VeggieDate.com (http://www.veggiedate.com). You can search for someone who is vegetarian or vegan or only eats raw food along with more usual criteria like religion, age and body type.

CUTTING OUT THE CREEP

Friendster lets people post a photo, some biographical information and the type of person they are looking for. Then you can look through other people’s postings. The potential pool of mates extends to up to four degrees of separation.

“Last year I noticed a lot of my friends were talking about using online dating services,” Abrams said, adding that even though those sites had been around for many years, there was a certain stigma attached to using them that seemed to have eased in 2002.

He considered giving some of the sites a try himself but was not too pleased with his options.

“They were all kind of the same,” Abrams said, “All kind of random and anonymous. I found the whole thing very creepy and not very appealing. I also noticed in real life that my friends preferred to meet people through their friends.”

Abrams says Friendster has 725,000 users all over the world — including some 10,000 in Malaysia — though the majority are in the United States.

Abrams already has his sights set on the 800-pound gorilla of Internet dating: Match.com (http://www.match.com).

“I think Friendster could be much bigger than Match.com,”Abrams said.

(The Livewire column appears weekly. Comments or questions on this one can be e-mailed to rachel.cohen(at)reuters.com.)