words by Lorna Li, photos by Bona of Napkin Nights
Online dating needs a Web 2.0 makeover. Engage may be the answer.
Last Wednesday, Engage‘s yummy evangelist Julian Brass invited me to his “Snazzy Jazzy Engagement” party at San Francisco’s Le Colonial, an elegant French Vietnamese restaurant with old-world charm. It was a welcome break from the past 4 days I spent at the Web 2.0 Expo surrounded by geeky guys who seemed far more interested in their computer screens than the opposite sex. In spite of the male-to-female ratio of 6 to 1, the Web 2.0 Expo was surprisingly, or perhaps, unsurprisingly a dating disappointment.
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The Engage party, had a hotness factor of 8.5 and no reek of desperation that typically pervades singles events. The crowd was professional, sophisticated, and most were smooth socializers. There was live jazz and swing dancing. And, though I was officially “on the job”, I even got asked out on a date by a very attractive man.
Engage is bub.blicio.us.
Engage removes the randomness factor of online dating by providing a social networking platform that allows your friends to be your matchmaker, as well as a voting system to rate the behavior of Engage community members. In a world where predators roam the Internet, creepy guys (and girls) attach other people’s photos, and everyone exaggerates their profiles, a recommendation from a friend adds a reassuring layer of trust.
Think LinkedIn meets Match.com.
Online dating has a lot of room for improvement. The online dating industry is huge and growing, as time-starved people turn increasingly to the Internet for love. As of 2006, approximately 4 million U.S. Internet users surf online dating sites for at least 17 minutes daily, amounting up to almost 4.5 billion pages views per month.
The 2 largest dating sites are Yahoo Personals and Match.com, with a combined total of 9.3 million monthly visitors. Some would also argue that MySpace.com is essentially huge dating hub in disguise.
While, many marriages have been made through online encounters, I dare to say that e-romantic bliss is hard to find in traditional 1.0 dating sites. There’s far too much trial and error involved, and it’s nearly impossible to verify whether your e-date is telling the truth.
The problem with online dating 1.0 is the relative lack of trust and the high randomness factor in the user experience. And I speak from experience.
I’m a single, exceedingly busy girl living a hectic, urban life. These days I juggle a search marketing day job, cover tech events for bub.blicio.us, and manage a web magazine about the rainforest, where I am web mistress, writer and editor-in-chief. I also just started a marketing blog for green and social activists, and will launch a green business blog very, very soon – if I could just find the time. And often, I disappear for long jaunts into the Amazon rainforest. Most of my ambitious, talented, entrepreneurial friends lead similarly busy lives. So at one point or another, we’ve all tried online dating.
My brief, but interesting foray into the world of online dating began with Craigslist.
Don’t do it.
My girlfriends and I crafted a well-thought out ad with qualifying questions like “Do you go to Burning Man?” or “Psychedelic or entheogen – discuss.” “You are in an intimate relationship and Valentines Day is 3 days away. What do you do?” was a question that stirred up the cesspool of male angst and produced of flurry of misogynistic diatribes.
Fortunately, I opened a new email account, which got flooded. In less than 24 hours I received approximately 150 emails but so many men found my ad inappropriate that they flagged it and Craigslist immediately took it down.
Yahoo Personals, based mostly on basic demographic information, was a bit of a miss. I had the awkward experience of showing up for a date with a guy who had sent me a picture that was NOT him. I actually politely listened to his stream-of-consciousness monologue for 40 minutes before I abruptly excused myself.
eHarmony subjected me to a 45 minute MMPI-like self-reported psychological survey with sneaky, rate-on-a-scale-of-1-5 statements like, “When I don’t get my way, I get extremely angry”.
It then calculated my answers (tchik, tchik, tchik), chugged out my personality profile, and that of my “ideal partner”, which (egad!) was the exact description of my last ex I was madly in love with, who broke my heart when he moved to the Caribbean to chase a far-fetched business opportunity.
Over the following weeks, eHarmony proceeded to email me matches of overweight or scrawny homely-looking guys from the burbs that seemed desperate to settle down and procreate. Wait – I’m certain I indicated a “5” for physical fitness.
Though I got my money back from eHarmony, that 45 minutes of my life was, regrettably, non-refundable.
Where to Find Julian Brass
Julian Brass is a recent transplant to the Valley – he comes from Toronto, Canada, but has lived in Costa Rica and Miami – ay caramba! His flair for fun events comes from 10 years of event marketing with a company called BrassVIPS, where he built market share for brands such as Rockstar.
Julian co-hosts this event with Gabrielle Miller, founder of Ab Fab Productions. The next “Snazzy Jazzy Engagement” will take place again on Monday, May 30 @ Le Colonial.
Join Julian’s community on Engage, it’s temporarily free – his username is ‘ThirdWheel’ or email him for invitations to exclusive upcoming events: julian.brass [ a t ] engage-corp.com
In the meantime, keep your ears open for ‘The Six Match-Me Challenge’ by Engage.
Sources:
Online Dating 2.0: Thirteen Sites To Find Love
Photos by Bona of Napkin Nights
lornali lorna+li julianbrass julian+brass web 2.0 engage web+2.0 web+2.0+expo web2.0expo w2e onlinedating online+dating+2.0 bay onlinedating2.0 parties
Discussion
Engage is interesting, but I would not call it Dating 2.0. The only example I have seen of that is over at http://MaybeMike.com
Hi Heidi,
How would you define Dating 2.0 and why in your opinion does Engage not qualify?
I’ve done every online dating site out there over the past 7 years, and I have to say, better than investing in the memberships etc. has been sinking money into therapy to explore why I was avoiding F2F engagement. The last 3 men I’ve dated have been men I’ve met in the real world, and they’ve all been healthier psychologically than any man I met online.
Get outside and play, girls! The men who date online skew broken.
Dear all,
“Engage” does not qualify for Web 2.0, because there IS NO “web 2.0″ – and as you can learn from the article, “social life” may work offline far better than online. Besides that: You found all those young upper middle-class women an men there – so where can you find the rest of the people – sure NOT in the so called web-based “social comunities”.
Best wishes
sehpferd
No Web 2.0?
Has this entire last year been one big hallucination? Were the 10,000+ people who paid $1500 at the Web 2.0 Conference all deluded?
I will concur that the term Web. 2.0 has been stretched and interpreted in many ways. However you might coin it, there certainly is a revolution going on in the Internet space, of increasing socialization, online interaction, information democratization and community building.
Can these technologies improve online dating? Yes!
Are they a substitute for real, face to face social interactions?
No!!!!
The key is to combine the online factor with a valuable offline factor. I’ve met many great friends through Meetup and Upcoming.
And yes, while it was interesting to e-date, practice flirting, hone my psycho=freak-asshole-detection skills, and take the pulse of male-female relations “out there”(yikes – its BAD!) …NOTHING beats getting out and meeting people in person in an offline environment.
Personally, I’ve decided that being alone and going about my biz is a far better use of my time.
Kudos to those who have found true love online.
Lorna