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Internet daters worry—legitimately—about online scammers. In short, scammers haunt dating sites for vulnerable lonely singles willing to believe anything to hear loving words. I’ve written extensively here about scamming (you can read my posts at http://www.find-a-sweetheart.com/blog/C48/). This story below is a horrific description of a complicated scam that goes beyond the typical “sweet words for money” that is more usual. Victoria really asked for trouble with her “Love is blind” statement. It’s not clear from the article where Lisa wrote “Love is blind”, but if someone is asking to be taken advantage of, “Love is blind” is a good clue. Lesson: be careful what you write that may set you up as a target. And stay suspicious.
Lonely heart’s kindy teacher horrifying journey: from to drug mule to jailbird
LES KENNEDY AND LEESHA MCKENNY
“LOVE is blind,” wrote Victoria Nicholson when, down and out in Somerset, England, she logged her profile onto an internet dating site.
Two years later the preschool teacher is paying dearly for her lonely search for love.
Nicholson, 46, chased a Shirley Valentine dream from England to China in 2007 but wound up serving time for smuggling heroin worth up to $88,000 into a country she has only ever seen through the window of a prison truck.
“I’ve never been in trouble in my life,” she told The Sun-Herald from Dillwynia women’s prison on Sydney’s north-western outskirts.
“I’ve made a mistake and I’ve been stupid for the person I fell in love with and I have also been used. I think it all goes together.”
Nicholson’s search for love and companionship on the internet was “like an addiction” and she eventually met a charming Nigerian called Emmanuel, a 32-year-old trader, online in April 2007. He quickly offered her a new life in China.
“He said, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ I believed him because I so badly didn’t want to be alone,” she said.
Despite pleas from her 22-year-old daughter, Nicholson decided to fly to Guangzhou in July 2007, lured by the promise of a job and a lover, and the chance to leave behind a string of abusive and broken relationships, and a constant battle to make ends meet.
“My family and [others] tried to stop me, especially my daughter,” she said. “I said I’ve got nothing to lose, I’m going, I’ve made my mind up.”
When Emmanuel met her at the airport, he was everything she’d hoped he would be. Tall, dark and charming, he helped her find a job at a private school located hours out of town, while he worked as an importer-exporter in Guangzhou.
But after a few weeks, things started to change. Her return ticket to England disappeared and along with it went her plans of returning home by Christmas. Then the man who said he wanted to marry her started going out alone late at night.
“I thought he had another woman and he said ‘No, it’s not another woman,”’ she said.
“He said ‘Nothing’s for nothing, Victoria.”
On September 24, Emmanuel came home with two other Nigerian men and they had a package of “important medicine”. She said he told her they would be delivering it to Australia in what would be a holiday for them both. Then she discovered the flight booking was just for her.
“I blame myself,” she said. “All I keep thinking in my head is why was I so stupid?”
She said one of the men barked a clear and chilling instruction at Emmanuel: have sex with her, violently, to “make it fit”.
“It began to get fierce and that’s when he brought out the package,” she said. “I was crying and sweating and he got the package and tried to ram it between my legs.”
Screaming and bleeding, she begged him to stop.
“He said: ‘I’m sorry, I have to do this. He said, ‘There’s no time, you’re committed.“‘
In those shocking few minutes, Nicholson became a drug mule.
Still in shock and pain, she said she was forced into several pairs of pants, given $US600 ($930) in cash - including $US200 in forgeries - and an address in Sydney. She was put on a plane with an escort, who disappeared after holding her in the transit lounge of Bangkok airport to ensure she boarded the connecting flight to Sydney.
“Somebody said ‘Why didn’t you go to the authorities in Bangkok?”’ she said. “I didn’t even think. I had no feeling, I was emotionless.”
She spent the entire flight in fear, thinking another member of the drug ring was aboard the flight, watching her to see if she made it through Customs.
Nicholson was near hysterical, sweating, shaking and in pain when she was pulled aside by Customs officers after her flight touched down at 12.30pm on September 25, 2007.
She confessed immediately and begged to be allowed to go to the toilet. She suspected the package inside her had started to leak.
“I [still] thought I was going to see the Sydney Opera House,” she said. “They must have thought I was a joke.”
Among her few possessions was a piece of paper with an address on it for a motel in Chullora. “I didn’t know where Chullora was,” she said.
Last November, having pleaded guilty to a charge of importing a marketable quantity of a border-controlled drug, Nicholson was sentenced to a maximum 4? years in jail with a non-parole period of 2? years.
Today she languishes in Dillwynia, longing to leave Australia and her darkest days behind her.
She jumps when doors open. She’s scared of men. Most of all she worries about her two children, one of whom is serving with the British navy.
“If I’m truthful to myself I’ve been a fool,” she said.
Lying and how to stop it in online dating is THE hot topic nowadays. Here are some suggestions from Online Dating Newsletter:
Telling Lies on Your Online Dating Profile
By Joe Tracy | Feb 20, 2009
Research shows that more than 50% of online daters tell lies in their online dating profile. This alarming number is starting to take a toll, with more and more people becoming fed up about others fibbing. There is an assumption when online dating that what you see is what you get. You expect a person to look like their picture when you meet them. If a person says their fit, you don’t expect them to be overweight. If a person says they are 6′0 you don’t expect them to be 5′8″.
It happens everywhere. And stopping it begins with you. Here are our two recommendations:
1) Be 100% honest in your profile and only post a photo that is 1-2 months old at most.
2) Wear an outfit on your date that you wore in one of your online dating photos. Between the time of the photo and your date don’t make any major changes to your appearance (i.e. new hairstyle, new hair color, etc.).
3) If you go out on a date with someone and see they have clearly lied, call them out on it. You don’t have to do it in a mean way. You can even do it as a question/conversation:
You: Didn’t you say you were 6 feet tall in your profile.
Date: Well to be honest, most people won’t date men under 5 feet 8 inches; so it’s the only way I can get a date.
You: And you don’t feel that is deceiving people?
When people aren’t held accountable for their actions (like lying) they find it easier to tell more lies.Also, when you go on a date, you expect the person you meet to be who he/she said they were and you expect them to look like their photo. Remember, if you’re caught in a lie on your first date, your date will wonder what other things you lie about. Don’t let this happen to you.
Drew and I started a wine course last night, and one of the first four wines we tasted was a winner for eye appeal: Peter Brum’s Gold Sparkler is a sparkling wine with real gold leaf floating in it—24 carat!
If you want to score a home run with your Sweetheart, this beautiful wine would be quite a way to celebrate an evening. At less than $20 a bottle, it also is quite a bargain. And BTW, you drink the gold speckles along with the vino. Wow.
eHarmony is well financed, for sure. In nine months last year, it spent almost double what Match.com spent on ads.
EHARMONY BLOG—Feb 11 --
eHarmony spends $93.3 million in advertising in 9 months, almost twice as much as Match.com—see chart below, figures in the $100,000’s”
Rank Site Jan 07 to Sep 07 Jan 08 to Sep 08
1 eHarmony 79,019.631 93,255.171
2 Match.com 51,170.580 47,607.049
3 Chemistry.com 12,125.655 28,282.073
4 Cupid.com 1,067.142 847.231
5 Nocheatersdate.com 0.000 822.042
6 Blacksingles.com 272.964 510.251
7 AdultFriendFinder.com 0.000 243.553
8 AshleyMadison.com 59.977 243.420
9 Ciaorossano.com 0.000 212.750
10 ChristianMingle.com 0.000 201.213
Source: The Nielsen Company (2009)
It’s not very often that women have a chance to get the real story from real guys about what is going on in their minds and lives in reference to women. Six Boston men recently sat down and talked. The women though had to be cautioned to be nice… See below the coverage in the Boston Herald, I underlined what I thought was particularly interesting.
‘Man Panel’ lets ladies grill guys about sex, dating and relationships
By Lauren Carter
Ladies who dream of putting men on the spot finally have a place to do just that.
“The Man Panel,” a monthly series started by Boston writer Laura Warrell, rounds up six men of various ages and relationship statuses and lets an audience full of women bombard them with questions.
Friday’s session, “The Sex: Let’s Talk About It,” promises to be X-rated. In terms of conversation, anyway.
But January’s theme was a bit tamer: online dating. Panelists included regular Joes (and Marcs and Toms) of the single and taken variety, as well as Sam Yagan, CEO of megadating Web site OKCupid.com.
Ladies of various ages feeling the pre-Valentine’s Day pressure rounded up their posses and came out to the United South End Settlements building to learn how to snag a dude in cyberspace.
For a $10 fee they got snacks, drinks, pre-panel old-school jams, a chance to win some choice giveaways and, of course, answers to their burning questions.
Apparently women aren’t the only ones in need of a little online love guidance. A healthy number of men turned out, including lifestyle dating coach Thomas Edwards, 23, of Boston. Edwards jumped in the online dating waters a few months ago for practical reasons.
“You get to meet people you wouldn’t normally meet on a regular basis, so it kind of improves your chances,” he said.
Before asking the panel some prepared questions, then opening the floor to the audience, Warrell put the crowd on notice: These panelists are not your boyfriends and they’re not representatives of the male species, so be nice.
The men talked of doing “crush research,” (also known as online stalking,) on their potential dates. One panelist, an engineer, revealed that he creates a spreadsheet giving his dates grades of As, Bs and Cs.
Then it was onto the Do’s and Don’ts of creating a profile: Don’t make your profile too short or too long. Avoid the disclaimer “I’m only trying this because my friends told me to.” Forget cliches such as “I love long walks on the beach.”
Other tips: Honesty is key, and so are recent pictures that don’t involve you being visibly intoxicated or hanging on the arm of some mystery man. Nix the pics of the sunset (without you in the picture) and don’t post the one of you in your bikini.
Remember to stay positive - you don’t want to seem like a downer with issues. Do provide hooks or nuggets of unique information that someone can easily respond to. Do provide a body shot, but not a weird angle (mirror pics, anyone?).
Yes, ladies, guys will Google you, and no, you shouldn’t lie about your age.
“If you’re going to put yourself out there in a certain way, be prepared to back it up in person,” said Jesse, 33, a single guy from Boston who works in sales and marketing.
There were no definitive answers, only opinions, humor and Heinekens. The feel was informal and friendly, but a little too short and structured to offer true insight. Many questions from the audience weren’t so much questions as long-winded recaps of a lifetime of online dating drama. With a few more hours of free-flowing conversation and beer, however, some of the mysteries of the universe may very well have been solved.
And now Patti gives it to the guys. Go Patti!
Dating Tips From Patti Novak From Online Dating Magazine’s Online Dating Newsletter February 24, 2009
Here are some of Patti Novak’s dating tips for men:
> Make an effort to clean yourself up--it shows that you care about the date. Be sure to shave that day. Don’t wear wrinkled clothes with sneakers.
> When you’re on the date, be attentive, ask questions and really listen. And don’t forget to make eye contact. Eye contact and a nice smile can steal a woman’s heart.
> If you’re going out to dinner, brush up on your table manners. If you hold the fork like a toothbrush, please ask someone to show you the right way.
> If you want to go out with a woman on the weekend, don’t call her on Friday--I find a lot of guys make this mistake. In the first three months, she may not be dating exclusively so don’t assume she’s sitting back and waiting for you to call.
> No matter how excited you are, don’t send flowers after only a couple of dates. It makes women nervous if you come on too strong. Wait until you’re at least a few months in.
Patti Novak is the popular matchmaker from Buffalo, New York and author of the book GET OVER YOURSELF.
Patti Novak’s Dating Tips for Women
By Joe Tracy
(Online Dating Newsletter) Patti Novak is a popular matchmaker in Buffalo, New York and the star of the former TV series, Confessions of a Matchmaker. She’s also written a new book titled “Get Over Yourself!: How to Get Real, Get Serious, and Get Ready to Find True Love.
Leave it to Patti to put it on the line. Here she gives some blunt advice to the ladies:
Here are some of Patti’s Dating Tips for Women:
> Laugh and have fun. If you’re excited to be on the date, really show it. The guy wants to know you’re having a good time.
> Too many women (more so than men) conduct a date like an interview. Don’t ask him how much money he earns or if he has a 401k. You’re not writing his portfolio.
>If you have four cats, he may not need to know that right away. No one loves your pets like you do.
> Don’t ask him what happened between him and his ex. Women have the compulsive tendency to ask this one—we can be the nosiest creatures on the planet.
> In that first encounter, you don’t need to tell him you just lost 25 pounds—it creates a visual you may not want him to have so soon.
> Promote your intelligence, but don’t be afraid to show your softer side. A man wants an intelligent and independent woman, but he also wants her to be feminine.
Online dating is definitely maturing from what it was when I was first on Match.com in 1998. Here’s some observations about where things are now from the tech world:
Dating 2.0: Looking for Love in All the Online Places
by Ashley Laurel Wilson
February 17, 2009, 02:01 PM — CIO.com —
Sometimes looking for love takes a back seat these days-especially with demanding schedules that include working long hours and furthering educational goals. While technology is a very large factor in causing people stay so busy, it’s also helping people connect more, even in the romantic sense.
Not every person who dates online is as horribly geeky as Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip—there are some cool geeks out there just waiting for you to meet them. In fact, more than forty million Americans have tried online dating at one time or another and some have walked away very happy.
“My wife refuses to let me try it. Go figure.” Bryan C Webb, technical marketing professional from Ontario Canada
Though different people swear by certain online dating websites, the number one free online dating website in the U.S., U.K. and Canada is Plentyoffish.com, run by CEO Markus Frind. Since its 2003 launch, the site has grown by word of mouth to more than 13 million page views each day.
According to Frind, there’s always a jump in site traffic between the day after Christmas through the Wednesday after Valentine’s Day, as well as just before Thanksgiving. Singles tend to join the site around family-related holidays-anytime they’re reminded of being single, Frind says.
The mastermind behind this website, Frind claims anyone in his position has to be a romantic after reading so many happy stories from users who’ve met someone great on his site. “It’s part of the reward of doing this site,” he says. (Frind, however, met his own girlfriend offline.)
Denver-based Jon Freeman, however, chose to use an online dating website to as a platform to increase his chances of finding a suitable person.
“I was a two time ‘loser’ having used less than intelligent methods to find the ‘right person’ and figured I needed a better process-the Web gave me just that ability (I know, so romantic),” Freeman says. “I’d tried other sites and even online personals, but in the end I went for the site with the most people on it to increase my odds on finding the perfect one.”
While using Matchmaker.com, Freeman realized that the “percent match function” wasn’t helping him so he made some minor changes-his favorite color turned from orange into blue and his pet lizard became a dog-which actually helped him meet his future wife. Within a year of their initial online connection, Freeman got married. “We finish each others sentences and rarely argue or fight. We are very much in love with each other,” Freeman says, still satisfied with his online dating experience.
Brad Thomas, from Kentucky, met his wife through instant messaging and agrees that there isn’t any special recipe for meeting people online. “I’ve never used a dating site or agency. So I think online “dating” encompasses a whole lot more than just eHarmony, virtual worlds etc. You don’t need a virtual meeting “place” as such, just a mode of communication.”
Thomas—who met his sweetheart in the U.S., invited her to the U.K. with him, proposed in Paris and now lives with her in the U.S.-isn’t afraid to go the extra mile for love.
But even for those that never meet their love interest in person, some, like Jared Ubriaco from Florida, find online relationships rewarding. In 2007, Ubriaco was an online gaming fanatic, and after regularly playing World of Warcraft (WOW) for a few months, he realized he didn’t know anything about the other online gamers, especially one female player in particular.
“Sometimes we had this mind connect,” Ubriaco says about his relationship with the female player. After the two players began talking during game play, they realized they hit it off and kept in touch for more than a year while Ubriaco worked in the States and she taught English overseas.
Normal people write letters and talk on the phone, but we kept in touch through voice chat rooms and e-mails, Ubriaco says, adding that they also sent small presents to each other for holidays and birthdays. The two were, in a sense, dating.
However, after she returned home to the States, they lost touch for a few months before he found her on World of Warcraft again. Though they’ve still never met in person, they keep in touch through e-mail and he’s been invited to visit her in Washington.
While technology is streamlining how we meet others, sustaining a long term relationship with someone only online is tough. At some point, signing offline and meeting up for a cup of coffee is a much needed next step.
Just remember, to get to the coffee phase, make sure your Internet connection is strong enough so you don’t accidentally sign off in the middle of a getting-to-know you conversation or your potential love muffin might get miffed.
A segment of the singles population that really suffers in the online dating world are those with disabilities, particularly disabilities that show up in looks. Thank goodness that dating sites have cropped up that cater to the disabled population. Just Google a disability and “Dating site” and I’ll bet you find something somewhere for folks who are similar. But it can be real hell on the mainstream sites if you are less than perfect. Online Dating magazine is starting a column for disabled daters. Here’s the first one:
Dating with Disabilities
by Melissa Blake
What Does it Mean to Love in Today’s World?
Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome Melissa Blake to the Online Dating Magazine team where she will be writing about dating with disabilities on a weekly basis.
My good friend, Claire, once dubbed me “a downhome Carrie Bradshaw.’ I’m not quite sure what exactly she meant by this moniker, but she coined it one day after we’d had lunch together at our local diner. She later told me she saw me zooming down the street in my wheelchair, past the lagoon on a bright, sunny day, chatting away on my cell phone. I took the new name as a compliment; I suppose this puts me somewhere in the middle of a fast-talking, fall-in-love-too-fast power girl from Manhattan and a laid-back and hugely awkward girl from a small Midwestern town.
So who am I, really, besides just a girl sitting behind a computer screen and giving you an inside look at my heart and my thoughts?
I’m the girl who can usually be found wearing a chic polo shirt (red is my favorite!). I’m the girl who is a bit awkward, a bit dorky and still a bit innocent. I’m the girl who isn’t afraid to laugh at herself. I’m the girl who still, at 27, celebrates her half birthday. I’m the girl who colors outside the lines. I’m the girl who is bold and confident (though I’m not sure men have picked up on my boldness yet). I’m the girl who likes to leave a little mystery behind her.
I’m the girl who writes about anything and everything in her life, even the boys she falls madly in love with who don’t even know she exists. I’m the girl who is still so shy that she gives said boys code names in said writing (you’ll see....). I’m the girl who’s mastered the art of loving from afar, but ultimately, never having the courage to tell the gorgeous, sweet, funny, charming guy that he is, in fact, gorgeous, sweet, funny and charming. Or when I try, it always ends up not sounding anywhere near as sleek and sophisticated as it did in my head.
I’m the girl who, at 16, wrote a list in my diary of Personality Traits I Want My Future Husband To Possess. I’m also the girl who lets these 20 traits guide her heart still today.
I’m the girl who thinks imperfections are beautiful and sexy.
And I’m also the girl who has overcome great obstacles – 27 surgeries, countless hospitalizations and enough needle pokes to last me two lifetimes – despite being born with a physical disability. I’ve never let it define who I am or my life, but in the last few years, oddly, my disability has seemingly morphed into the defining factor when it comes to my attempts to strut my stuff on the dating scene. I ve often asked myself these questions: How can you get someone (a guy, in my case) to look past your disability – or any other of your insecurities – and see the real you. Not the you with makeup on. Not the you wearing a sparkling dress and heels. Not even the you who smiles even though
she’s sad. The real you – without makeup, metaphorically naked and not ashamed to show people who you are.
I can’t say I have all that much experience in the world of love, romance and the intensity of relationships that drives people to do crazy things in the name of love. In all honesty, when it comes to said relationships (especially those involving the opposite sex), my run-ins have all had three things in common: dorky, awkward and quirky.
But I do know I’ll find The Big L someday.
What’s better than redefining love altogether? Injecting my own brand of quirkiness into it – in heavy doses. The way I see it, love and relationships are like a one-way street always under road construction. You can see your destination, but can’t quite get there, right? And let’s not even get started on all those confusing signs pointing every which way. What do those signs even mean?
But really, what does it mean to love in today’s world? What is it that keeps our blood pumping and our hearts racing? Because let’s face it, love in the modern age, with an inbox full of emails and an overflow of texts messages, isn’t what it was even 10 years ago. The ways we find love and the ways we keep it have all changed, and I, just like you, am trying to keep up.
Come along for the journey; you might learn a thing or two about yourself along the way.
Who knows? Maybe someday I really will be the Midwest’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw. Anyone up for a glass of spiked lemonade on the porch?
~ Melissa
P.S. I realize this all sounds like one big profile on Match.com. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll let you be the judge.
I miss Patti Novak and her show on A&E Confessions of a Matchmaker. But Patti’s come out with a book (haven’t we all?) and her voice rings loud and clear. I sat next to Patti at the first Matchmaker’s convention. So you are two degrees of separation from the Buffalo matchmaker.
Hello, Patti Novak!
BY CRISTINA KINON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, January 11th 2009, 5:40 AM
Love is recession-proof. Just ask matchmaker Patti Novak.
The Buffalo native, who stars in the A&E series “Confessions of a Matchmaker,” about her personal matchmaking business, is expanding her brand with a book, “Get Over Yourself! How to Get Real, Get Serious and Get Ready to Find True Love” (Ballantine Books, $24), which hit bookshelves this past week.
“My father once told me, ‘Patti, the world will never not need love,’ and I believe that’s true, especially today,” Novak told the Daily News. “If you can only afford popcorn and a six-pack on a Saturday night, you certainly don’t want to be doing that alone.”
“Get Over Yourself,” co-written by best-selling novelist Laura Zigman, is like a dating workbook. It features Novak’s rules, strategies, insights and even surveys and questionnaires to be completed by the reader in an effort to better understand what kind of daters they are. Chapters include “Understanding Your Relationship History,” “Self-Diagnosis,” “Facing Your Demons” and “First Date 101.”
What sets “Get Over Yourself” apart from the thousands of other dating-advice books is Novak’s unique style of tough love. Just like on her show, Novak shows no mercy as she pinpoints love-seekers’ issues and what to do to overcome them.
“I’m going to be able to get away with telling someone that the extra 70 pounds is a problem because I’m a blind party,” said Novak. “Imagine trying to tell a friend that! That’s not a good situation, so people need me to be objective.”
Novak, who’s been bartering love connections since she was 10, also includes a chapter on Internet dating in “Get Over Yourself,” though she’s not a big advocate of it.
“The Internet is here and it’s not going anywhere, so I put it in the book to highlight the safety aspects of it. But I want people to only use it as a tool to practice their dating skills,” said Novak. “Don’t go into it thinking you’re going to find the love of your life. You may, but go into it as a practice forum.”
Some of Novak’s first-date “do’s” include:
1. Dress to impress.
2. Less is more when it comes to makeup.
3. Carry breath mints.
4. Be yourself.
5. Be on time.
Her list of “don’ts,” however, is much longer.
“I no longer assume that anything is common sense,” said Novak. “You won’t believe what some people think is a good idea to talk about to someone they just met. One woman I matched told her date she was on Prozac. Half the country is, but the fact that she brought it up on the very first date scared him.”
So don’t talk about your medication. Also, don’t get wasted, don’t forget your date’s name, don’t interrupt your date, don’t talk about sex, don’t talk about exes, don’t talk on your cell phone, don’t flirt with anyone that isn’t your date, don’t chew with your mouth open and don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve. And that’s just a sampling.
Novak says “Get Over Yourself” is appropriate for every kind of dater of every age.
“Everybody’s different, but I’d say 27 years old and up is when people really start calling me,” she said. “They’re out of school, moving out of the bar scene and don’t have many alternatives to meet new people.”
Others are stuck in a pattern of bad dates or are recently out of a long-term relationship or marriage.
“The motivation to put this all down into a book is the realization that dating is a universal problem for all people,” said Novak. “There are so many people looking for love and don’t want to be alone, so it becomes a burden in our heart when we are.
“Dating shouldn’t be as complicated as it is, but human nature makes it that way. But if you can just love yourself, be kind to others, get out there and look your best, your world will change.”
As we all know, normal covers a lot of territory. See what happens in Normal’s Taco Bell:
Normal couple weds at Taco Bell
Associated Press - January 10, 2009 11:44 PM ET
NORMAL, Ill. (AP) - Wedding bells meant Taco Bell for Paul and Caragh Brooks.
Customers inside a Normal outlet of the fast-food restaurant continued to order tacos and burritos as the couple married yesterday in 1 of its booths.
Thirty-year-old groom Paul Brooks said he and his bride have an off-beat relationship and thought an off-beat setting would be appropriate.
Employees displayed hot sauce packets labeled with the words “Will you marry me?”
Twenty-1-year-old Caragh Brooks wore a $15 hot pink dress for the $200 wedding. Several dozen guests looked on as the couple’s friend, Ryan Green of Normal, administered the vows.
Green was ordained online, making the ceremony a fitting happy ending for a relationship that began on an Internet dating site.
Finding love usually involves spending some money. “Smart Money” weighs in with advice for online daters:
Avoid Being Duped By Online Dating Sites
From Smart Money:
THOSE WHO’VE TRIED their hand at online dating recently may feel like they’re looking for love in all of the wrong places.
Complaints about online matchmaking and dating sites are up 73% from 2005, according to the Better Business Bureau. Among the growing number of grievances: so-called sweetheart scams and misleading claims from the sites themselves. Attracted by the money-making prospects of the $890 million the online-dating industry pulled in last year, virtual Cupids have been popping up everywhere, says David Card, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. Yet, while the number of online dating and matchmaking services has grown by 173% since 2004, the number of dating hopefuls using these sites has remained relatively flat. That’s resulted in fierce competition among the online-dating services, which are desperate to squeeze whatever profits they can out of their ventures, whether by hiking subscription fees or embarking on even less scrupulous practices.
These deceptions are only exacerbated by users more apt to think of online dating as a means to a fairy tale ending, rather than a purchase requiring careful research, says Diana Falzone, host of Maxim Radio’s dating talk show “DeVore and Diana.” “At the end of the day, online dating is capitalism at its best, and we’re the products,” she points out. “This isn’t just about the heart. It’s about being a smart consumer.”
Opt to try a free site, and there’s little to lose. But the bulk of serious online dating happens on the pay-for-play sites, which can cost an average $30 per month. Add-on services and tiered memberships can easily double that cost. If your heart’s still set on finding your true love online, use these six tips to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your money.
Crunch the numbers
A common complaint about online dating is that sites exaggerate the number of potential dates that you’ll have exposure to. In 2007, while 10% of Internet users posted a personal ad on an online dating site, only 5% became paid subscribers, according to Jupiter Research. The problem: Typically only subscribers can reach out or respond to other users, says Trish McDermott, a co-founder of Match.com who left to co-found Engage.com, a social-networking site geared toward dating. Considering that you’ll be narrowing your options further by location, age and other factors, it’s important to start with as wide a field as possible. For data on the true number of subscribers at a site, search its “About Us” or “Frequently Asked Questions” pages.
Browse the wares
The most common complaint about matchmaking sites, which choose potential dates for you, is that the quality of the singles don’t meet the seeker’s criteria (i.e., you asked for nonsmokers and got a smoker, or you’re based in New York City and the closest date, geographically, lives in Philadelphia), according to the Better Business Bureau. Don’t pay for access to a site that doesn’t first give you a free glimpse of the subscribers that meet your list of qualifications, cautions Steve Cox, a spokesman for the BBB. You may not be able to contact the prospective dates directly until you pay, but at least you know that you won’t be matched up with a bunch of duds.
Conduct a background check
Your penchant for bad boys (or girls) shouldn’t pertain to the dating service you select. A squeaky clean image is key to ensuring a healthier relationship. Check for complaints online at the Better Business Bureau. Read consumer reviews at online dating review sites like eDateReview, as well as general review sites like ConsumerSearch.com.
Don’t be blinded by sweetheart scams
There are more dangerous deceptions in online dating than a middle-aged guy with a spare tire posting a photo from his college football days. Sites are rife with so-called sweetheart scams, which aim to swindle online daters out of cash, warns Dale Miskell, supervisory special agent in charge of an FBI cybercrime squad in Birmingham, Ala. “They’ll send some candy, flowers or a teddy bear, all paid for with a stolen credit card,” he says. “Then suddenly it’s: ‘I’d love to see you, but I need money for a plane ticket; I need money for my visa.’” Or the scammer might ask you to cash a (fake) check for them.
Before posting that profile, look into the dating service’s policies regarding background checks or account suspensions for suspicious behavior. New Jersey just passed the Internet Dating Safety Act, requiring online-dating services to disclose their criminal background screening processes, including what they look for, or if they look at all. If you do meet someone online, don’t be so blinded by love that you ignore a few red flags: would-be dates who live far away, who can’t seem to arrange phone calls or in-person meetings, or who continually ask for favors, says Miskell.
Guarantees are for suckers
Dating sites try to woo new customers with money-back guarantees if they fail to find love within a certain time period. But you’d be a fool to trust that advertising sweet talk, says Falzone. It takes just a few emails from another user to nullify the deal. “From their perspective, you met someone but it just didn’t work out,” she says.
Learn how to break up
Nearly 70% of complaints against online-dating sites stem from billing issues. Unless you specifically cancel your account, your membership may be automatically renewed — or, in the case of free trials, segue right into a paid membership. Consumers also complain that canceling an account doesn’t always stop subscription fees from being charged to their account. Read the fine print when you sign up to find out what you need to do to wiggle out of your subscription once you’ve met Mr. or Ms. Right. Always pay with a credit card to protect against auto billing pitfalls. When you do cancel, secure a confirmation from the company.
Well, it’s a bit creative, I guess, to propose on Twitter, but stranger things have happened:
Twitter Marriage Proposal: Bloggers In Love
Grant Robertson from Download Squad has proposed to his girlfriend Christina Warren (TUAW and Download Squad) on TWITTER. That’s right. On Twitter. Social networking has come a long way.
Things Better Left Off Twitter: Bridezilla Edition
Eric Krangel | January 9, 2009 5:15 PM
Can Internet oversharing get any worse than self-described “new media douchebag” @grobertson getting down on one knee (in front of his computer) to ask his girlfriend to marry him.. on Twitter?
Oh yes, we’re afraid it can. Because @film_girl countered his four aces of fame-trolling with a royal flush of oversharing. After happily tweeting “yes! Yes! Yes!”, @film_girl went on to beg her 4.526 followers to promote her Twitter-proposal.. on Digg.
She’s got 702 Diggs so far. Sounds like this couple was made for each other, good luck.
If you have ever wondered what is behind the scenes technologically of online dating sites, here’s a lengthy article from Computer World that goes into the knitty gritty. I underline the parts I thought most interesting.
Online dating: The technology behind the attraction
Ever wonder what powers eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, True.com and PerfectMatch.com? We peek under the covers at online dating sites.
Robert L. Mitchell
February 13, 2009 (Computerworld) When Joe wanted to find love, he turned to science.
Rather than hang out in bars or hope that random dates worked out, the 34-year-old aerospace engineer signed up for eHarmony.com, an online dating service that uses detailed profiles, proprietary matching algorithms and a tightly controlled communications process to help people find their perfect soul mate.
Over a three-month period last fall, Joe found 500 people who appeared to fit his criteria. He initiated contact with 100 of them, corresponded with 50 and dated three before finding the right match. He’s now happily in a relationship, and although he was skeptical at first, he says high tech played a big role in his success.
Internet dating sites are the love machines of the Web, and they’re big business. eHarmony and similar sites drew 22.1 million unique visitors during just one month, December 2008, according to comScore Media Metrix.
And unlike many social networking sites, they actually make money—the top sites bring in hundreds of millions per year, mostly in subscription fees.
These online dating services run on a curious mix of technology, science (some say pseudoscience), alchemy and marketing. Under the covers, they combine large databases with business intelligence, psychological profiling, matching algorithms and a variety of communications technologies (is your online avatar ready for a little virtual dating?) to match up lonely singles—and to convert one-time visitors into paying monthly subscribers.
All is not chocolates and roses online, however. Security is one big challenge for e-dating services, which can attract pedophiles, sexual predators, scammers, spammers and plain old liars—most notably, people who say they’re single when in fact they’re married. And sticky questions have yet to be answered over what rights such sites have to your personal information—how they use it to market other services to you, if and how they share it with advertisers, and how long they store it after you’ve moved on.
Finally, there’s the biggest question of all—do these tech-driven, algorithm-heavy sites work any better to help people find true love than the local bar, church group or chance encounter in the street?
Armed with these questions, a passably decent head shot, and a very patient wife, I set out to discover what’s under the covers in the world of online dating.
The business model behind online dating
A well-oiled Internet dating machine can generate well in excess of $200 million a year in a market that’s expected to top $1.049 billion in 2009—only gaming and digital music sites generate higher revenues—and is expected to grow at a rate of 10% annually, according to Forrester Research.
Most popular online dating sites in 2008 Site Market share
1. Singlesnet 16.41%
2. Plentyoffish.com 13.76%
3. Yahoo Personals 5.21%
4. Match.com 4.79%
5. True.com 3.51%
6. Adam4Adam 3.00%
7. eHarmony 2.99%
8. Date Hookup 2.89%
9. ManHunt.net 2.33%
10. BlackPeopleMeet.com 2.06%
Source: Hitwise. Market share numbers are based on percentage of all visits to U.S. sites in the online dating category, averaged over a 12-month period.
Most online dating sites generate the bulk of that revenue from subscriptions, although free, advertising-supported sites are starting to gain some ground.
In fact, Plenty of Fish, a free service, was the second-most-visited online dating site last year, behind Singlesnet, according to Hitwise, a Web site traffic monitoring service.
Most dating sites allow users to sign up and create a profile for free.
Before communicating with matches, however, visitors must sign on as a paying member.
To succeed, a site needs to do the following:
* Offer excellent response times. People want instant gratification, so the sites try to give users at least some matches as soon as they’ve created an account and completed their profiles.
* Convert at least 10% of visitors who register into paying customers—preferably more.
* Deliver an acceptable range of probable matches and offer a variety of ways to pursue those prospects, including high-tech developments from video chat to photo-realistic avatars.
* Keep the quality of the prospect pool high by weeding out inactive and misbehaving users and by blocking the 10% or more of new accounts every day that are estimated to be scammers, con artists, criminals, sexual predators and other undesirables that can overwhelm a site and drive away paying customers.
The battle isn’t over once a service has its inventory in place and has paying customers. The business needs to keep priming the pump to bring on new subscribers because the typical customer—one of the 10% who actually pay—stays on less than three months.
But one man’s folly is another man’s fortune: A large percentage of customers fall off the love wagon after finding their “one true love.” They keep coming back over and over again, producing a revenue stream that has a very long tail, says Herb Vest, CEO and founder of the dating site True.com.
Step 1: A perfect match, served up fast
Online dating sites take two basic approaches to provide users with matches.
Online personals services such as Yahoo Personals (which costs $29.99 for one month, $59.97 for three months or $95.94 for six months), are glorified search engines—big, searchable databases. Users fill out a short profile with check-box items and short descriptions about themselves.
They then narrow down the search by filtering prospects using criteria such as gender, ZIP code, race, religion, marital status and whether or not a person is a smoker. Users filter through the results themselves, deciding on their own which prospects to pursue.
The “scientific” matching services, such as eHarmony (which costs $59.95 for one month, $119.85 for three or $179.70 for six), PerfectMatch and Chemistry.com, attempt to identify the most compatible matches for the user by asking anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred questions. The services then assemble a personality profile and use that against an algorithm that ranks users within a set of predefined categories; from there, the system produces a list of appropriate matches.
Some sites take a hybrid approach. PerfectMatch.com, for example, issues recommended picks but also lets customers browse the “inventory” for themselves.
The technology that powers these dating sites ranges from incredibly simple to incredibly complicated. Unsurprisingly, eHarmony has one of the most sophisticated data centers. Joseph Essas, vice president of technology, says the company stores 4 terabytes of data on some 20 million registered users, each of whom has filled out a 400-question psychological profile (eHarmony’s founder is a clinical psychologist).
The company uses proprietary algorithms to score that data against 29 “dimensions of compatibility”—such as values, personality styles, attitudes and interests—and match up customers with the best possible prospects for a long-term relationship.
A giant Oracle 10G database spits out a few preliminary candidates immediately after a user signs up, to prime the pump, but the real matching work happens later, after eHarmony’s system scores and matches up answers to hundreds of questions from thousands of users. The process requires just under 1 billion calculations that are processed in a giant batch operation each day. These MapReduce operations execute in parallel on hundreds of computers and are orchestrated using software written to the open-source Hadoop software platform.
Once matches are sent to users, the users’ actions and outcomes are fed back into the model for the next day’s calculations. For example, if a customer clicked on many matches that were at the outset of his or her geographical range—say, 25 miles away—the system would assume distance wasn’t a deal-breaker and next offer more matches that were just a bit farther away.
“Our biggest challenge is the amount of data that we have to constantly score, move, apply and serve to people, and that is fluid,” Essas says. To that end, the architecture is designed to scale quickly to meet growth and demand peaks around major holidays. The highest demand comes just before Valentine’s Day. “Our demand doubles, if not quadruples,” Essas says.
Online dating site visitors
Snapshot: November 2008
* Total number of visitors to online dating sites: 22,274,000
* Male users: 52.4%
* Female users: 47.6%
Source: comScore Media Metrix
PerfectMatch.com, which claims to have 5 million members, uses a matching algorithm, but its psychological test is shorter than that required by eHarmony. “We wanted to take the basic concept of the Myers-Briggs indicator and apply that to relationships,” says Founder and CEO Duane Dahl. The core architecture of the system consists of five front-end Web servers and a large, back-end SQL Server database, plus a variety of servers that handle messaging, marketing and other functions. The matching process is immediate.
True.com also offers “scientific compatibility” matching based on how users answer about 200 questions. The site uses about 200 servers, including a 64-bit, 32-processor Unisys server running Microsoft SQL Server. The matching algorithm’s calculations are performed on an array of 64-bit servers that hold a compressed version of the entire multi-terabyte database in memory to facilitate fast matching. “The system can shoot back [matches] with little or no delay,” says CEO Vest.
On the other end of the spectrum, Plentyoffish.com’s philosophy is to keep it simple. The service focuses on searching and filters: It uses a short questionnaire, and while it does offer some matching capabilities if users want them, CEO Markus Frind says he doesn’t promote them—and he is disdainful of the complex matching algorithms offered by some competitors.
The business operates on just three Web servers, five messaging servers and five database servers (the entire database is just 200GB in size), yet it serves up 200 billion pages a month to some 12 million users. “My entire cost is only a few hundred thousand dollars a year,” says Frind. The biggest piece isn’t the technology, he says, but the bandwidth required to keep traffic to the site flowing smoothly.
Step 2: From “just looking” to “paying customer”
When it comes to converting users to paid subscribers, the battle is all uphill in an industry in which more than 90% of users never pay a dime. That’s where having extensive demographic and psychological data on customers comes in handy.
In fact, online dating sites are so adept at using personal data, potential customers can be forgiven for wondering just who is being “matched up”—two strangers bent on true love, or lonely customers and the matchmaking site that needs them. (See Online dating: Your profile’s long, scary shelf life for details on the ways dating sites mine the data they collect.)
Yahoo Personals uses all of the information at its disposal to tailor its sales pitch to the user. “We try to take advantage of what we know about the user and where they are in their level of engagement with the product,” says Ellen Perelman, general manager.
Once users sign up for a free account and fill out a short questionnaire, Yahoo uses targeted messaging to push them through a “conversion tunnel.” The messages that users see to persuade them to sign on as paying customers vary depending on the user’s profile and his or her behavior on the site.
Similarly, PerfectMatch.com puts users on different “message tracks” based on their profile and what they’re doing on the site at any given time. “Everything you do or don’t do triggers a response,” says Dahl. “We take the information and do a comparative analysis on the fly to serve up the best possible offers to you based on your profile.”
Users who aren’t “taking full advantage of the site”—who haven’t posted a photo, for example, or have failed to review all their matches—are targeted by the system. “You will get an e-mail message custom to your situation, encouraging you to perform the action needed,” Dahl says.
eHarmony, which has the most comprehensive user profiles, may be the most sophisticated in the ways in which it leverages that information. It pulls information—more than a terabyte of data each day—from its Oracle database into high-performance Netezza data warehouse appliances that slice and dice users into behavioral and demographic “buckets.”
“We use [Netezza] to do a lot of offline calculations to try to understand patterns and business intelligence about user behavior,” explains Essas. Some of that feeds back into the matching process, but it also helps eHarmony persuade users to subscribe to its service. “Because we know more about them, we can target them much better,” says Essas. Messaging is tailored to each user’s behavior on the site—and their personality type.
Step 3: Make a high-quality connection
Once users have paid for a subscription, online dating sites offer different tech-driven options for contacting and getting to know prospective dates, everything from chat rooms to instant messaging, e-mail and even video chat.
eHarmony controls the process by moving users through a series of proscribed communication steps on its Web site. The idea is to make users of the site comfortable with each other, but sometimes the technology just gets in the way, or backfires, users say.
Mary, a 45-year-old executive for a large IT consultancy, says the process of moving from eHarmony’s prewritten questions and responses to online chat to e-mail to telephone can be tedious when what you really want is to meet someone. “You continuously go through this job interview.” Then, after all that, people will suddenly cut off communications. “What happened?” she asks.
Video chat is perhaps the most controversial communication method offered, if only because video sessions often take a “sexual tilt,” especially with men, and that drives away the women, says Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch, a newsletter that covers online dating and social networking sites. Mary explains the situation more plainly: “You go look at their webcam, and they’re naked.”
Some sites try to police that. True.com, which refers to video chat as “virtual dating,” has staffers who constantly watch banks of security monitors that alternate between the 300 to 700 video chat sessions occurring at any one time. Participants who are breaking the rules may be kicked offline for an hour—or permanently—or staff may “whisper” a message to them to knock off the deviant behavior. Flashing your breasts, showing a weapon or showing your kids will get you a whisper, while showing “below the belt” body parts or verbal abuse will get you kicked off for an hour. “Porn site girls,” underage users and scammers get the boot.
Perhaps the most innovative communication method is virtual dates in a 3-D world. One company, OmniDate, offers an avatar-based virtual dating system that acts as a kind of front end to existing online dating sites and is developing a new version for rollout later this spring that will use photo-realistic avatars. (See Online dating: Avatars tackle the first date for you for a glimpse of just how foxy one reporter can look online.)
So far, few sites have adopted the technology. Frind at Plenty of Fish decided to pass. “At the end of the day, it creates a false sense of reality for people. The point is to meet someone as quickly as possible,” he says.
Step 4: Weeding out cheats, scammers and married guys
Mary, who says she has used most of the major services out there, worries about stalkers and fraudsters when visiting online dating sites—and for good reason.
Stories of negative user experiences associated with online dating sites range from the woman duped into sending $4,500 in emergency funds to a man she thought was stranded in Nigeria, to pedophiles who scan the online dating sites looking for lonely women with kids to the New York woman who was the victim of a romance scam that cost her $100,000. The Internet Crime Complaint Center’s 2007 Internet Crime Report found Internet fraud had risen and that online dating fraud was one of the most commonly reported complaints.
The top 5 types of abuse on online dating sites
1. Identity mining/phishing and/or 1-1 credit card fraud - 61%
2. Spam - 14%
3. Profile misrepresentation - 7.6%
4. General misconduct - 5.9%
5. Solicitation - 2.9%
Source: Iovation compilation of incidents from online dating sites using its security services
Keeping out the riffraff is a big headache for Plenty of Fish. “Ten percent of sign-ups a day are people trying to scam someone—or rude, obnoxious people, or spammers,” Frind says, adding that he removes about 2,000 suspicious users from the system daily. The issue is such a large problem that Frind has spent more time writing programs to deal with undesirables than he did creating all of the other elements of the service.
Online dating sites use a variety of approaches to detect suspicious accounts. “These are not the sharpest guys out there. They use the same techniques over and over,” says PerfectMatch.com’s Dahl. He looks for scammers who set up an account and blast e-mail messages to thousands of people, as well as for certain keywords and phrases that might indicate trouble.
eHarmony has recruited outside help to combat the problem. In addition to in-house tools, Essas says, the company has contracted with Iovation Inc., which offers ReputationManager, a service that gathers information on individuals’ illicit activity from online dating and other sites and makes it available to subscribers. (See Blocking the bad guys for more on how Iovation’s service works.)
True.com takes a broad-brush approach to security by blocking users with IP addresses associated with specific countries, such as Nigeria. Such steps immediately filter out about 10% of applicants, says CEO and founder Vest. eHarmony flags certain IP addresses, but Essas says it doesn’t do wholesale blocking because many of its clients travel.
True.com is the only major online dating site to run criminal background checks on everyone who subscribes to its service—a fact that it trumpets in its marketing messages. Vest says True blocked 80,000 felons from subscribing last year—about 5% of total requests. “Our view is to do more than anyone else is doing and make it so hard on the scammers that it’s easier for them to go elsewhere,” he says.
Other sites have been hesitant to embrace background checks. “Scammers use stolen credit cards all the time, so what good is a background check [on a stolen identity]? It’s more of a [marketing] gimmick than anything,” says Plenty of Fish’s Frind.
Dahl doesn’t think background checks are reliable. “There are hundreds of law enforcement databases that aren’t communicating with each other,” he says, adding that PerfectMatch does offer its users the option to buy background checks using a third-party service.
Users like Mary and “Michelle,” a 45-year-old scientist who asked that her real name not be used, liked the idea of background checks. But a much bigger problem in their eyes was meeting “single” men on dating sites who turned out to be married. “There’s supposedly a screening process. That’s why you pay the extra money,” Michelle says.
Vest understands the problem but says technology can’t help. “We tried to screen for married people and it got to be almost impossible,” he says. True.com dropped the practice last June.
Do online dating sites work?
While they may be helpful as an introduction service, the jury is out on how effective they are at creating better long-term matches.
eHarmony and other online dating sites have their own studies and success stories about the services, but no independent research has been completed that demonstrates the effectiveness of online dating services.
Online dating site trends
* 10% - Increase in traffic to the top 10 online dating sites in 2008 over 2007
* 8% - Increase in time spent on the top 10 online dating sites in 2008 over 2007
* 22 minutes, 27 seconds - Average time spent per visit to the top 10 online dating sites in 2008
Source: Hitwise
Do the matching algorithms produce better matches that lead to long-term relationships? Dan Ariely doesn’t think so. “The sites are claiming a lot, but show no evidence of doing anything useful in terms of matches,” says Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT who is researching ways in which online dating sites can do a better job.
Ariely hasn’t examined how well those proprietary matching algorithms work, since eHarmony and other sites won’t release the details. But he suspects that they’re not very effective. “My unsupported guess is that their algorithms are placebos,” he says.
His suggestions focus on providing more meaningful information—more along the lines of what people typically exchange when they meet, such as the books they like to read and who their friends are. He also advocates virtual games as a way for people to get to know one another better.
Joe, the aerospace engineer who’s now happily in a relationship, thinks people get out of online dating services what they put into them. While he was reluctant to consider online dating at first—he says he was “bullied into” using eHarmony by friends and family—he says the service worked well. “Most of the matches—maybe 80%—were pretty close to what I was interested in.”
The key, he says, is being honest when filing out the profiles. “Honesty really is what makes the filtering work,” he says. To that end, he not only tried to be honest with himself, but recruited two friends to review his answers. He says the service pushed him to consider people just outside the boundaries he had set for criteria such as age and distance. “I’m not sure we would be dating if I hadn’t been matched up with her,” he says of his new girlfriend, who was located outside of his initial distance limit.
Others have had less luck. Jake, a 56-year-old writer and editor, has used many of the free services online. He is still single, and his expectations aren’t high. “I don’t expect miracles from these sites, but they do increase the number of interactions I have, and that’s all I’m looking for.”
Michelle has all but given up. Online personals helped her meet people who were at least looking themselves for someone, but the quality of the matches—and the number of married men on the sites—left her turned off on the experience.
Ariely sees that situation as a tragedy. “This is a market that needs a lot of help—people are single and want to find a match—but the sites are not really helping solve this problem. They just provide a list of other people, somewhat like a catalog,” he says.
While Joe met a girlfriend on eHarmony who is “pretty much everything I could hope for in a woman,” he’s still hedging his bets. “It has only been a few months,” he says. “I’m interested to see if it will last.”
If it doesn’t, he’ll be back in the game—and the dating sites will be waiting for him. “The relationship doesn’t end once they cancel the subscription,” says Perelman at Yahoo Personals. “A high percentage of our users resubscribe.”
Ah, the dilemma of whether to post a photo or not—that is the question. For sure, a photo, any photo, will get you more attention than not having one—stats suggest seven times more viewings. And that is an old stat. Now, with the ability to search “photos only,” likely profiles with no photos get little if any attention at all. For sure, as this article points out, those with no photos leave themselves open to suspicion: What is this person trying to hide? Of course, it may be that the person is not so good looking, or he or she doesn’t want their spouse or the neighbors to know they are two-timing. But the most frequent reason for non-posting a photo that I hear is that the poster is high-profile in his or her community and does not want to mix their professional life with their personal. While I understand this reservation (I had a similar one when I was looking on Match.com and was a prominent psychotherapist in my small city), still, what’s wrong with looking for love? Being recognized on a dating site is like seeing someone you know in a gay bar. No use worrying, because you are there for the same reason. Also, the possibility of being recognized would likely keep everyone more honest and humble. Would you want your boss and co-workers to see you bragging or exaggerating in your profile essay?
See this article below for more musings:
No photo available! What’s the story behind online facelessness?
By J. Michele Brown For the St. Louis American
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 8:04 PM CST
When you visit an online social network like iseecolor.com or a dating website like blackpeoplmeet.com and you come across a profile with no photograph, what do you think?
Is it just me, or do you wonder what the story behind the facelessness is?
Online social networking allows us to get to know people we may otherwise not have contact with and exchange thoughts and ideas. It’s one of the most exciting ways to communicate, when done responsibly.
Many people have a tough time meeting people face to face without judging, so how much more difficult would it be to communicate with a faceless profile online?
It is hard enough, when we do get a picture, especially on a dating site. We hope that the face and the description are genuine. Katt Williams may make us laugh about this subject in the movie Internet Dating, but some of us have found out, this really happens!
So I asked around. Most people thought the faceless profiles had something to hide and what they were hiding probably wasn’t good. What I also learned was many people had an immediate prejudice toward these profiles.
Wow, that was amazing to me. It did not matter how good looking a man or woman profiled him/her self to be, most did not buy it. Others felt there maybe another issue going on, like perhaps the person was in a committed or secret relationship.
The general consensus was if we hide our face, we are probably hiding something else.
In all fairness, some beautiful people and some professional people told me they simply did not want the world viewing their pictures. Some create profiles just to see who’s online or what one of these online sites is like. Others feel they want someone to get to know them before seeing them, which made them freer to express themselves. I personally respect these positions as well.
Are we really so superficial or insecure? If we check out the sites that attract people between the ages of 15 and 29, we almost always see photos in their profiles. They are far less self-conscious. Sometimes we see more than we ever wanted to. However, when we check out sites that attract a mature audience over 30, there tends to be more faceless profiles.
But don’t be fooled – some of us over 30 can get down like we were still in our college days on our profiles!
This new age of internet communication brings about new opportunities to enhance our socialization skills. So, the next time you are online hanging out with more friends than you ever had in your lifetime, before you deem the faceless profile a social outcast, remember prejudice is rooted in what we do not see and what we do not understand …
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