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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 The latest generation of matchmaking sites is starting to show some promise in helping 21st century singles hook up In the winter of 2002 Jonathan Abrams began to hear a lot about online dating from his friends. Everyone was using Web services such as Match.com and Yahoo! personals, or so it seemed. As a single in Silicon Valley where the dating scene rivals that of Antarctica, Abrams had the same problem his friends did with finding suitable dates. But he didn't like the way online dating services worked. He felt they were "...too anonymous and creepy." Abrams thought he could do better. He envisioned a system that would mimic the way many of his happily coupled acquaintances had met: through friends of friends. His site would encourage subscribers to invite their friends and form loose networks of online connections. Users would be able to see and talk only to people who were connected to their circle, that is, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, or at the most friends of friends of friends of friends. And if someone behaved badly or impeccably on a date, the site would provide a feedback section on each member to allow others to share impressions. A former programmer at Netscape back in the early days, Abrams also had the advantage of understanding how to build the software required to power this idea. He started his company, called Friendster, in August, 2002, and a beta version went live in March, 2003, with no charges. Abrams didn't market the service. He just told his friends about it. And they told their friends, and they told their friends. ENHANCED PROFILING. As of June, 450,000 people had joined. The membership roll is growing at 20% per week, says Abrams, who plans to start charging for some features in the near future. "We get a ridiculous amount of feedback. And the feedback is overwhelmingly positive from most people," he says. Friendster is one of several of new services rolling out in the second half of 2003 that aim to significantly improve online dating from the first versions launched in the late 1990s. Others include enhanced psychological profiling and compatibility rating systems from industry leader Match.com and San Francisco dating upstart eMode Match. If they can do that, the mating game will be forever changed as online dating truly fulfills its promise of providing a comparatively painless, cheap, and easy way to meet the perfect other half. "Our goal has been that we have to hit it out of the ballpark on the very first set of 10 screen profiles we return to our customers. That match has to be somebody so compelling that you get out your credit card," says Mark Thompson, a PhD psychologist who's also the CEO of Dallas compatibility technology company Weattract.com. DUSTY PARADIGMS. It's all part of the ongoing sea change in this notoriously frustrating common pursuit. Centuries ago, marriage was more an economic exigency than a rite of love. That changed for good with the arrival of modern industrial society when people started choosing mates based on personal characteristics and attraction. However, the leap from that to modern digital society in the 1980s and '90s left the old dating paradigms in the dust. In 1970, 28.3% of the U.S. population was single, according to the Census Bureau. By 2000, that percentage was up to 40.4%. With tens of millions of Americans changing addresses each year, the deep community ties that often resulted in long-lasting relationships leading to marriage have become rare. Longer hours at work have likewise put a damper on dating. And the workplace itself, now rife with fears of sexual harassment, no longer presents the same opportunities for romance. "There's a delay of marriage as people pursue careers. There is the decline of the nuclear family. The old ways of meeting people are not as useful anymore. The idea that you get married at 25 at the local church doesn't happen anymore," says Abrams. O.K. ON MAIN STREET. Pop psychologists postulated that the world would inevitably become a more lonely place, and hand-wringing authors penned tomes such as Bowling Alone and Urban Tribes dissecting the rise of singular souls. In steps the Internet to fill that yearning need in an era of connected disconnectedness. First the province of early adopters and Web wackos, during the late 1990s, online dating crossed the respectability tipping point somewhere in late 2001 or early 2002, as Abrams and countless others have observed. Now the shift is in full swing as the Main Street crowd has increasingly taken a shine to this new mating medium. Since January, 2003, the number of visits to online-dating sites has soared 51%, according to Hitwise, an Australian company that tracks traffic coming from Internet service providers around the world. Web consultancy comScore Media Metrix tallies the total number of people using these services worldwide at 37 million. The leading U.S. site, Match.com, has over 8 million active profiles alone, equivalent to nearly 5% of the U.S. adult population. What's more, people are increasingly pulling out their credit cards to pay the matchmaker. According to the Online Publishers Assn., Web surfers anted up $302 million to buy personals at dating sites in 2002. That's a 319% increase over 2001's $72 million. That support isn't confined to urban singles from 25 to 40. McDermott says Match.com is also growing quickly in rural areas and among seniors. "We just did a talk-show segment of 80 year-olds looking for love online, and we had dozens of customers willing to talk about it," says McDermott.
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