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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 10, 2003
Finding Love Online, Version 2.0 [Page 2 of 2] "OPPORTUNITY AND OPTIMISM." In a slow and subtle shift, the dating sites appear to taking some of the perceived pain out of the dating game. According to Trish McDermott, vice-president for romance at Match.com, studies run by the online dating company have found singles growing increasingly optimistic about their chances for meeting someone special. "We believe there's a correlation between opportunity and optimism. Never before in the history of dating has it been so easy to get to so many eligible qualified dates and use the technology to help you do this," gushes McDermott. Such breathless talk might have seemed insipid a few years ago. Even today, many people who try online dating say they've had mostly horrible experiences. But McDermott cites a January, 2003, survey of 1,100 Match.com customers that found 81% felt more comfortable talking about online dating in public today than they did a year ago. In that same survey, 88% of respondents said they would be attracted to someone they met on an online-dating service, vs. 52% in a bar or a nightclub. To understand the small changes underpinning the big shift, you need to talk to someone like Marissa Aroy. A 30-year-old documentary filmmaker from Berkeley, Calif., she has always liked dating but never did much of it because she found it hard to meet people she was interested in. After hearing from friends that online dating was actually pretty cool, she dove in last year. SHARPER DATING SKILLS. While she found some duds on Match.com -- the guy who said he was a great salsa dancer but had three left feet, for example -- on the whole she was more than satisfied. "Going on 10 dates in six months was nothing I had ever experienced before. I learned about what I wanted and didn't want. I also learned how to say "you're a great person but this isn't what I want,'" she says. According to McDermott, online dating has made it easier for people to practice dating skills. "Dating is something we get better at with practice. We become better at making choices and get better at executing on the date -- wearing the right things, asking for the first kiss," she says. Of course, making the choices becomes harder as millions and millions of people go online and filtering potential suitors becomes an onerous task. And that's where online dating version 2.0 is heading right now. Friendster, Match.com, and eMode, among others, are quickly rolling out technological solutions that can help people narrow the field using a variety of tools. UNIQUE THUMBPRINT. These tech Holy Grails vary. With Friendster, the ideal online scene is a replication of a casual party where you might hook up with interesting friends of friends who run in similar circles and have the same social interests. At eMode you play a version of "40 questions" to establish a personality profile. The site will later give you percentage compatibility ratings of other people in the service. Match.com is perhaps the most radical of the bunch. Weattract has built a free-ranging free-association test designed to mimic the most accurate psychological surveys. Match.com is planning to roll out the latest iteration later this summer. Thompson won't reveal the exact nature of the system, but he claims it holds the promise of creating a digital dating thumbprint for everyone who participates. Aside from a compatibility-matching engine that rates pairings, the system will include a feedback mechanism to fine-tune results and findings. "When users see a profile, they'll be able to get feedback on whether they thought it's a good fit or not. When you start doing that, you start teaching the system, and it starts learning," says Thompson. Getting improved results is probably necessary as newcomers join the early-adopter crowd. "The late adopters want solutions. They're the Consumer Reports people, and they want to read such and such dating site has a 70% success rate before they pay to join," claims Thompson. ENDLESS MENU. Whether all of this ends up making a huge difference in coupling up the world remains an open question. It's far to early to chart demographic shifts in marriage rates that could be attributed to online dating. And the new phenomena might even encourage the opposite. As people realize they can sample the menu forever, they might feel less pressure to settle down once sitting at home alone on a Saturday night is a thing of the past. At the very least, however, online dating has succeeded in making the world a slightly smaller place again. Again, consider Marissa Aroy, who met her current long-term boyfriend on Match.com. They dated for a while and then drifted apart to date other people online. Months passed, and they ran into each other in an art gallery. The encounter rekindled their interest, and they started dating again in earnest. Without the original online introduction, they would likely have passed each other by in that gallery without a second glance.
 By Alex Salkever, Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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