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GreatBoyFriends

GreatBoyFriends, which was acquired by TheKnot in 2005, tries to remove the exaggeration (or lie) factor inherent in online dating. Friends, family and ex’s are asked to leave feedback about them. GBF then verifies the endorsement or removes it. A key selling point is that married or otherwise unavailable people don’t use the site.

Guided by the recommendations, users search for themselves or recommend matches for their friends. The site drives referrals by waiving a week of the $20/month subscription fee for referrals and adds users by creating accounts for non-users when they are referred on the site.

MatchActivity

MatchActivity is a new site that sets up a date before the introduction. Users post activities in their area by tags and then chose the respondent they like the most and carry out the plan. Added features allow you to add buddies, rate user reliability, target invitations to a specific person, and be notified when that certain someone you admire posts an activity. For an activity based site, it’s surprising there is no date/time filtering for searches and a lack of standard messaging features makes it hard to use the service to keep in touch with successful dates using the site. See a positive review here. MatchActivity is free, but offers a $8/month premium version to allow one-on-one communication outside of activity planning.

MatchTag

MatchTag has the same core activity tagging feature of MatchActivity.com, but wraps it in a more complete social network. Users post activities to the general population and chose partners from respondents, but also has more complete messaging and commenting features to fill out the user experience outside of activities. This is because MatchTag’s founders view it as a service not only to meet new dates, but also friends in your area. MatchTag’s added calendar feature makes it easy to not only find activities you know you like but also stumble upon new ones.

MingleNow

MingleNow, a new venture from BlueLithium, is pre-launch. You can add your email to the home page for updates, or see their blog here. Early reports from testers say that MingleNow aims to join online and offline social gathering. Users registering on MingleNow will group themselves by what real world locations they hang out at (bars, restaurants, cafe’s, etc.) so groups can mingle online and off. The site will also include a rating system to gauge member’s flakiness along with other metrics. We’re looking forward to reviewing this when it launches – it may be great for non-dating social interaction as well.

Online dating is big business, drawing about 4 million U.S. Internet users daily in June 2006 (and 25 million monthly), and they spend a daily average of nearly 17 minutes each on these sites. That adds up to a lot of page views – almost 4.5 billion per month (source: Comscore). And that doesn’t take into account the billion-a-day Myspace page views, which many people argue is basically a very large dating site. All told, at least 15% of U.S. Internet users visit an online dating site each month.

The two largest dating sites are Yahoo Personals and Match.com, respectively, with a combined 9.3 million monthly visitors. Both allow free browsing, but to communicate with other members you must pay a fee. Match.com charges $30/month for the basic plan; Yahoo’s fee is $25/month. Both sites also offer premium plans that attempt to help you find a compatible mate.

An entire batch of next generation dating sites have emerged that are starting to nip at the established players. One, PlentyofFish, launched in 2003 and has over half a million monthly U.S. visitors. Recently, even Google has entered the space through their Google Base product.

One big difference is that these sites are (mostly) free, making revenue from ad sales alone. But many of these sites are also experimenting with new ways to introduce people who may be a good match. Mostly dating sites offer free registration but to pay or there’s a payment when you contact with other member of the dating site. More on each below.

Consumating

Consumating launched in the summer of 2005, was acquired by CNET in December 2005 and relaunched last month with a new interface and features. Its tagline is “Find People Who Don’t Suck,” and tagging plays a big part in the service. Consumating is clearly aimed young hipsters, who can make themselves more “popular” by answering questions to fill out their profile. Users search by loose age ranges (20s, 30s, etc.) and tags to find friends and partners. The site also seeks to engage users through a variety of contests and weekly user quizzes. Other Consumating features include a widget that streams member information to a web page based on parameters you set (everyone, zipcode, by tag). The site also has message board features. We’ve included a version of the widget below.

Engage

Engage seeks to hook up couples Fiddler-on-the-Roof-style through matchmaking. Users sign up with the usual descriptive profile, but then take on the role of either “dater” or “matchmaker” (or both). The fact that Engage uses its own member to set others up is their key differentiator, and gives the site a viral touch – even non members can be suggested for a match.

Users can browse as either matchmakers, recommending their friends, or as a dater looking for that special someone for a wing(wo)man to introduce them too. Daters can also directly email each other, however. Added features include user voting on potential couple’s compatibility as well as both dater and matchmaker reputations. Engage will charge members but is offering a 6 month free trial currently. Non-dating matchmakers can use the site for free.

Google Personals

Google Base (TechCrunch profiles here) allows users to enter personal profiles highly targeted towards dating (fields include gender, marital status, sexual orientation, etc.). Other features include labels (tags), a short description, location mapping, and an anonymous email to be reached at. So far, the personals section has been primarily used as a personals aggregator for Hot or Not and FindingSingles.com, a consequence of the mass upload feature. Also, for a bit of humor, check out this post by Damien Mulley on how to use Google to get laid.

When I first started dating online, I believed that it was important that my profile be funny. Unfortunately, I found the harder I tried to be funny, the worse my profile became. Eventually I gave up on trying to be funny and just used my profile to describe myself and what I was looking for. Looking back, this change went a long way towards improving my profile and eventually my overall dating success. As the saying goes, it is far better to be clear than clever.

From what I have seen, men are the ones who believe their profiles must be funny. To these men I ask this: do you think a woman is more likely to respond to a profile that is funny or one that has qualities she is looking for? I suspect the majority of women will pick a profile that has thetraits she finds desirable.

And yes, being funny is a desirable trait. However, being funny and trying to be funny are two very different things. Trying to be funny is difficult. Trying to be funny to total strangers in nothing more than a paragraph of text is even more challenging. Don’t believe me? Log into your preferred online dating site and look at a few dozen guys’ profiles. Keep a running total of those profiles that are funny versus those that are obviously trying to be funny. I’m confident if you do this you will realize why trying to prove you’re funny often has the opposite effect.

My advice: abandon the attempts to be funny. Write a clear profile and if it happens to be funny, that’s great! It’s also fine to list being humorous as a trait you have but don’t feel as if you then have to prove it! Being funny should not be your goal. Your goal should be to describe yourself clearly to your potential dates. If you absolutely must attempt to make your profile amusing, get some opinions from some friends before posting it. But above all else, never sacrifice understandability for humor.

One of the local newspapers here in Pittsburgh has an advice column which I discovered today. I’m not a fan of these columns because, in most cases, the columnists answer questions as if everything is overly simple. They also come off as overly-confident to me; as if no detail they are unaware of could possibly affect what good advice might consist of. I suppose, though, if you offer advice for a living then it is actually your job to simplify problems confidently…and that’s fine. It’s just not for me so I don’t read them very often.

Today’s article caught my eye, though, so I decided to read it: an admittedly shy and recently divorced man is trying online dating but isn’t finding any success. He asks how people who have not been dating for an extended time can get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately, the answer contained the standard “don’t be shy” which is a polite way of saying “don’t be yourself”. The columnist actually stated it as “ditch the shyness for bravery”. Riiiight.

This is what I don’t understand: if someone who had a stuttering problem wrote in would the answer be “don’t stutter” or “ditch the stuttering for clear speaking”. I sure hope not! Advice like this would be considered rude but when applied to something abstract like shyness, well, that’s different. In that case we feel we can look at someone and simply tell them to stop it. To me, the very suggestion that shy people want to be shy or that they can simply turn it off is ridiculous.

I agree with the columnist that it is best to approach people in the real world as well as in online dating but would say forget this idea that a person can suddenly become outgoing from willpower alone. Approaching someone when you are extremely nervous (even if you pretend you’re not) is likely going to end badly. So how can you approach someone if you are a shy person? The answer is not becoming outgoing or “brave”. The answer is becoming comfortable.

Having said all that, after looking at the columnist’s web site I found that I like much of her advice. In particular, many of the articles here are well worth a read – even the ones not related to dating! I just can’t bring myself agree with her “stop being shy” advice. I was shy when I started online dating and I’m still shy today but somehow, even without faking confidence or bravery, I found the love of my life. I am glad that I did not have to sacrifice who I am in my search for someone else. I don’t think anyone should have to.

A few other thoughts for any shy people out there who are frustrated with online dating:

• Don’t be overly obsessed with finding that “perfect match” early on. If you are shy, one of the most important things you can do is go on as many dates as possible. This process will help create the comfort I mention above. At one point I was averaging two first dates a week from online dating sites alone. During this time I approached women at bars and parties and I have NEVER done that at any other point in my life. I was comfortable because I had nothing to lose! My dating schedule was so crazy that I often felt relieved when getting turned down (and I only continued trying because, for the first time in my life, I was actually enjoying it).
• A lack of responses does not mean no one finds you interesting/attractive. There are many reasons why some communication is never returned.
• Some things are simply out of your control. For example, I lived in Pittsburgh when I was single which happens to be one of the worst cities for singles in the United States.

I was on a date once and for the first fifteen minutes things were going fine. Mid-date, though, something changed and I could actually feel the woman across from me withdrawing from our conversations. Soon, every question I asked was met with a single word answer and she was making no attempts to start any conversations. After several failed attempts at light conversation I saw things were going bad fast so I came right out and asked her what happened – what changed from the beginning of the date to bring us to that point? Her response surprised me: “If you don’t want to be here with me you don’t have to pretend to be interested in me. We can just go home.”

This was not what I expected to hear! I explained to her that while I wasn’t feeling any “fireworks”, I was enjoying our time together. I didn’t try to sugarcoat how I felt. This, along with my genuine shock at her statement, regained her willingness to talk. My date explained that she wasn’t angry with me but with herself and even agreed that she didn’t see our relationship moving beyond friendship. Regardless, she said, she was still upset with herself for “messing up” even if it was a relationship she wasn’t interested in! She never did explain what I did to make her feel this way. Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t fully committing myself to the conversation and she picked up on it.

With all the pressure to succeed gone, we spent the rest of the evening talking about online dating in general. We each discussed the struggles we were experiencing in depth. It was this date that opened my eyes to the fact that a woman has to struggle with very different problems than a man does. She described the worthless spam emails, the times where she would never hear anything from a man again even though the first date seemed to go wonderfully, the random creepy communication, and the amount of email she had to deal with. Just understanding these things made me feel much better about my own dating struggles (my lack of email responses in particular).

So…What’s Your Point?
I tell this story because it is important to realize that things are not always as they appear. A date that is going poorly is not necessarily going downhill for the reason you think it is. When my date became angry, I assumed it was because I wasn’t what she hoped for. I never expected her to suggest that I wasn’t interested in her! Also, just because a date appears to be going badly doesn’t mean you should run to the restroom so you can crawl out the window (although there are times where this is warranted). While this date did not lead to anything greater in-and-of-itself, it did change how I communicated online (it played a major role in forming the opinions I lay out in First Contact). This in turn eventually led me to meet my wife. With that in mind, I would encourage you to be willing to step out of “interview mode” and be open to really talking to the person across from you – even knowing that you may never see them again. You never know what can come from something as simple as being friendly.

Responding to a Withdrawn Date
Here are a few thoughts on responding to this type of situation:

• Avoid giving the appearance of being uninterested. In my story above, I did something to suggest to my date I was bored. Try to avoid my mistake by showing interest in your date. Even if you’re not interested in dating them in the future, it’s not as if ignoring them is going to move things along any better!

• Avoid risky topics or at least tread lightly over them. Your date may have a very good reason to be distant if you cause them to feel uncomfortable.

• Be open and honest. Most people are pretty good at picking up on when they’re being lied to. The fact that I didn’t try to pretend to be more interested than was true saved the evening.

It is natural for someone to withdraw if they believe they are going to be rejected. However, this is not the only reason a person might become withdrawn, or in extreme cases angry, on a date. I will discuss another situation in the near future where my date’s anger was entirely out of my control!

* Get prepared for dating. Decide who/what you are looking for, do your research to commit for dating. Prepare also for some let downs along the way but do not take dating too seriously either.

* Begin a regime of looking your best. Get fit and start a diet, get your new hair cut or styled and begin a new regime of good grooming or beauty treatment. You will feel a billion times more confident about your self.

* Go shopping and buy a new clothes and even whole new look. Get your image right. One that you can manage and live with but one that flatters you. Someone (people) appreciate appearance wherever you are.

* Do you think yourself married within 2 years? If you think do you then approach dating accordingly and prepare for yourself. To think/plan what your dating goals and timescales. Ask yourself in honest questions about why you are dating with and what you hope to achieve when you don’t take dating seriously.

* Sort out your confidence level to advance. You will feel better and be focused. Think always positive to boost your confidence.

* Be realistic when dating someone. Choose those you a good chance of dating, do aim realistically. Just show your personality or what you are and who you are. If you are looking for a glamor girl or boy and want to date someone trendy and gorgeous then good for you.

* Meet people in neighborhood and join societies, clubs, sports events, drama group, anything where you are likely to meet potential partners. I mean a kind of person you are looking for. Aside from social groups, you will not meet pople by staying indoors.

* Dating is the activity of looking for a suitable partner for an intimate, sexual relationship. The word refers to two daters agreeing on a time and date when they can meet and engage in some activity, thereby assessing their suitability for one another. Take time off from dating occasionally if its not going well.

* Enjoy dating for what it is. Dating, it is meeting people to have more confidence to show anywhere physically, emotionally and spiritually; socializing and spending time in the company of stimulating individuals who may or may not bring you a sparkle. The fact is, most people are interesting you may not be out there looking for new friends, you may well find one or two fabulous people along the way.

Friendship, as intimate relationships work with the exception that sex is not in the arrangement in some instances. Some friends join in friendship and later commit to sexual relations, thus leading to commitment or else separation. Love and Relationship is not after for sex but can commit that when a relationship is in good condition I mean the commitment and trust in there.

Friendships that are long lasting usually have the ingredients to make the relationship work. Friends may cause each other frustration, agitation, unintentional harm down the road in the relationship, yet the two will work together to make it work by finding a resolve.

Love and relationships built on true friendship will last through habits, behaviors, personality flaws, etc., providing violence or repeated actions of inconsideration and disrespect is ongoing. True friends will prove true to the end of the relationship.

Sometimes it is unfortunate that why people we want to love, choose not to love us back. I strongly believe that we all have a match in this word but need to wait until we can get a serious relationship with us and will last. When one attempt to a relationship fails, it simply meant to be. If you are affected with the pain because of the relationship, always remember you can recover it. This could be easily dealt with if only our emotions are not evolved when we start to feel strongly for someone but more often than not ,the heart rules strongly over our head.

If someone we love and don’t like / want us anymore, okay it is important we should learn to give them a freedom to find their own happiness. So, this is the perfect time for us to realize the pain that our life should not be independent on someone else’s presence. We are still exist without them, we strive to be happy at all times without them. Remember that at one point in our life, we should stop missing them and start thinking what we have been missing because of them. It seems, we are missing the opportunity to be happy with someone else. When someone who will not consciously avoid us but choose to be with us. Someone who will accept us what we are and who we are. Someone will not just, just listen when we say “I LOVE YOU” or “I LIKE YOU” but someone who will say it too and love you even more. I belive that love doesn’t make people wait. If we really love someone then we should not play w/ time and promises. If we don’t love a person anymore, then we just have to be honest about it, even if hurts.

Sometimes if we love a person but they are not or vice versa, it is not comfortable even it hurts. When you are on this stage or part, let the time to decide on what kind of people that God’s gives us. Waiting is the option that most people take but sometimes they refuse to accept when it is already obvious that they are just waiting in vain for someone who is never going to return to them. Let us always remember that sometimes, we have to use our mind over our hearts, when our feelings get too strong. When we think w/ our hearts, loving means wanting to hold on, when what we have to do it let go.

Honestly, I believe that there is always room for forgiveness for those who sincerely ask for it. What is important is that we forgive those who have caused us pain. What is important is we feel to those we love. Let us always remember that only the truth can set us free from the bitterness of the past and the pain that hatred brings. Only forgiveness can bring us the real peace of mind that we searching for. And in the end, only love can spell the diffence between winning or losing the people who truly mean a lot to us.

When you go on a date, Listening is just as important for both men and women seen to agree that is is a turn-off when their date talks about themselves. You have to show your date that you are interested in them and what they have to say. You answered all questions about your life, past and present. Talk about your future or ambition to become, your life in the past. Remember it is a date, not an interview.

Information or Tips when you go on a date. Say goodbye to awkward silence during a date.

Current Events… about the problem in the society, country and the globe. Have ideas about the Calamity like earthquake, typhoon, tornadoes or anything. Staying on top of current events is a huge turn-on to both sexes. You showing your intelligent and you care about what is going on and around the world you can got an impression. If you didn’t read any newspapers, you can search in the internet to get caught up quickly before your next date.
Know what sport is in season and know the name of the team in yoru city. ok, it seems really basic, but seriously know what sports are going on. But if you are not interested in the sport, just tell him/her honestly. I think the guy is interested in sports like basketball/rugby/baseball/soccer and etc.
Know how to pronounce the last place you traveled. This should be an easy one and a great way to start a conversation. “I just went to Nice, Paris, France and it was beautiful. Have you ever been there?” Now if you mispronounce the city and say “nice” you may not get far with the conversation.
Know the difference between a Cabernet and a Chardonnay. Know a little bit about wine will make selecting a bottle for you and your date to share much easier. We suggest going to a wine tasting. You’re learn about all the different varieties of wine, and get to taste them as well. If there is not wine tasting bars close by, pick up the movie Sideways, you’ll learn all about wine, in particular, Merlot.
Have at least one interesting piece of trivia to talk about (ie who will be next top model). Any time there is silence, throw out a random fact, it’ll be sure to keep the conversation flowing.
Know how to tell one joke well. Keep the jokes clean. No one wants to go on a date with someone who tells vulgar jokes on a first date. Keep the jokes to something you would tell your boss or your grandmother.
Know the big art scene (music, theater, movies) in your area. Even if you are not into the arts, know what is going on in your city. Check to see what hit off Broadway musical is coming to your area, any upcoming concerts or the new art exhibit at the museum. Even if you are now into the arts, this will definitely impress them. It shows you are well rounded.
If the restaurant menu is stumping you — just point. French restaurants can be quite confusing when it comes to ordering. Skip the embarrassment of mispronouncing the entree and simply point to the item you select. Or if you date orders what you want, “I’ll have the same.”
Where you parked your car. No one wants to see their date wander around the parking lot after they just said goodbye. If you’re concerned you may forget where you parked out of nervousness, valet the car.