The rendezvous was altogether different from what I was used to seeing on the TV show “Blind Date,” except for the fact that I had never met him. Trying to remember the face I had seen in the photo, I examined the people inside the window and dug my mittened hands deep into my pockets. My mind wandered over the possibilities of who this guy could turn out to be: engaging charmer, creepy flirt, self-absorbed jerk or, the most uneventful, a nice guy. Misgivings aside (for the sake of journalism), I smoothed my hair and walked into the homey coffeeshop.
Thus began my first Friendster date. Via this Internet service, which calls itself “the new way to meet people,” John had sent me a message saying “you’re totally cute.” Flattered, but not sure what to make of it, I took my time in responding.
Friendster operates as a sort of “six degrees of separation.” A friend e-mails you and invites you to join, or you can sign up on your own. You then build a series of connections between yourself, people you already know, and others whom those current friends list as their friends. This spiderweb of contacts expands as your friends add friends, who add friends, and so on. A gallery points out to you a few members who are in your personal network. My list of 17 friends supposedly connects me to 589,167 other members. The process of adding contacts can become a popularity contest-John boasts 301 “friendsters.”
With Friendster, you can create a personal profile and post up to five pictures. The categories within the profile are pre-set, asking basic questions such as sex, marital status and age. There is ample space to list interests, such as favorite music, books, TV shows and movies. For many, the endless ways of tweaking your profile and viewing the thousands of other profiles have turned Friendster into a fantastic way to waste time. Just think of browsing the site as akin to using Instant Messenger and reading everyone’s away message.
Friendster diplomatically handles distinctions between what type of relationships you’re looking to form. Are you interested in a girlfriend or just a friend? When you sign up and create a user profile, one category asks what you’re “interested in meeting people for.” Some options are very clear, such as “friends,” “dating” and “serious relationship,” for which you have the option of specifying men, women, or men and women. The most vague category is “activity partners,” created for those still unsure of what they’d like out of the site, or for those just leery of defining what “activities” are.
The Friendster web site notoriously backs up or takes an extended period to load, which annoys users, and , personally, has deterred me from accessing it often. The number of people using the website seems to be overloading the server, a good yet frustrating indicator of Friendster’s popularity. Georgetown senior and Friendster member Adam Reese remarks that “although the Friendster network is huge, it often takes an interminably long time to load pages. I would rather spend my time on MySpace.com, which is a much faster and more user-friendly service.”
I had been messaging with a 26-year-old named Mike about possibly getting together for this story, but technology and fate did not approve. Friendster claimed our connection had been lost because someone altered their friends list. This, combined with a four-hour delay in swapping messages prevented us from meeting. When I logged into the Friendster website a few days later, his personal photo had changed from one of him with a girl on each arm to one of him with a grinning baby strapped to his chest. We have not exchanged words since.
Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and an expert on gender communication, describes these online exchanges and Internet dating as a “natural extension of the technology available.” Students at Georgetown check their e-mail and use instant messages every day, so electronic flirtation shouldn’t be a foreign concept.
John has met up with about eight other people from Friendster, and says that “meeting people online is something I’ve never really thought twice about. It seems natural [because it’s] no different from running into someone at a bar.” The qualifier in his case, however, is that he categorizes most of those people he’s met as friends of real-life friends or people he has run into at concerts.
But what happens when you really don’t know who you’re talking to online? You’d think that intimacy would be difficult when staring at a computer screen, and certainly when transitioning from electronic communication to face-to-face conversation. Tannen, however, points out that “for some people, electronic conversations are more intimate because it’s like writing in your diary.”
She also points out that many people feel less threatened by online messages rather than speaking in person because they’re insecure about their physical appearance. Friendster and other online dating and networking sites allow users to create personal profiles to organize how they want to present themselves. In this way, Tannen said, online exchanges can allow the other to “see the real you.”
Much of the appeal of online dating and networking is that it puts you in direct contact with people who have similar interests. Each new dating or networking site is devoted to a specific market. For example, PlanetOut.com devotes itself to gay dating, Jdate.com provides the dominant Jewish dating web site, and eHarmony “finds Christian soulmates.” In order to compete with popular, catch-alls like Friendster and Match.com, newcomers increasingly have to make themselves appear unique.
The website of White Buffalo Ventures the company that owns GeorgetownSingles.com, declares to investors that it “develops online dating sites designed to meet the needs of your membership or constituents. If, for example, your organization is all about bicycling, then we can have cyclingsingles.com up in a week with your name on it.”
Serving the collegiate niche, CampusHook.com is the creation of 22-year-old Josh Abramson, president of Connected Ventures. Connected Ventures was born out of CollegeHumor.com, which a then-18-year-old Abramson created in Jan. 2000. Relying on the popularity of that website, which he calls “the most highly trafficked humor website on the Internet,” Connected Ventures launched CampusHook.com in March of 2003.
As a 19-year old skeptic of actually meeting and being alone with anyone from the great Internet beyond, I affirm Abramson’s belief that college-age students comprise “a harder market to get at with dating.” Sophomore Garriock Firth (CAS ‘06) lightheartedly remarked, “There’s as much chance of me joining an online dating service as getting a Russian mail-order bride.”
CampusHook is geared towards the general collegiate audience, not necessarily under the guise of dating. As Abramson says, “we’re not really calling ourselves a dating site, it’s more of just a ‘friendship site.’” This clarification aside, he points out that initial feedback demonstrated users were using the site to find both friends and serious relationships, and that a close friend had met a girlfriend through the site.
“I think most people, especially college students, when you ask, ‘what would you think about meeting your next girlfriend online,’-most of them laugh and don’t take it seriously. But I think when they’re put in that position and they see someone they’re attracted to … and they finally go out, once they meet each other the fact that they met on a website doesn’t really make a difference.”
One of only a few CampusHook.com members from Georgetown, Harrison Moore (CAS ‘06) claims that he joined the site at the prompting of a friend. Although he has not met anyone from the site in person, Moore says that he messaged a fellow Hoya from his home state of South Carolina, and has been messaged by other S.C. natives.
This claim seems suspicious, considering that you’ll see the same layout with the same photographs on websites for many other colleges and universities. The only real difference is that the Hoya has been replaced by some other mascot-for example, the University of Houston “Cougars” or University of Minnesota “Gophers.”
But what about just meeting other GU students? The website GeorgetownSingles.com is one of many websites that caters to a specific academic community. While not claiming affiliation with or endorsement by the University, it does assert that it is “where Hoyas get together.”
When I performed the broadest search possible-I profiled myself as “female looking for male,” with an acceptable age range from the lowest (18) to the oldest (110), located within 100 miles, and with or without a picture”-the site returned only 33 members. The youngest was a 19-year old and the oldest was 53. Switching only “female looking for male” (note the site does not allow female for female or male for male), I received 25 results. These numbers total a whopping 58 members of GeorgetownSingles.
Registering with GeorgetownSingles is the SAT of online dating. When you sign up, you will be asked to fill out a lengthy series of questions, and think fast-you are told you have 45 minutes. You must scrutinize your physical appearance, giving hair color, height, weight, the usual.
Unlike profiles in CampusHook, in which Abramson claims “people really have the ability to put more or less anything they want … as long as it’s not obscene,” most of your responses to GeorgetownSingles must come from a pre-selected list. For example, I could not say that my eyes were simply hazel. I had to pick from a drop-down list that I had “sexy hazel eyes.”
My own experience with White Buffalo Ventures through GeorgetownSingles has been rather humorous. When I registered with the site I gave rather flippant answers. On Feb. 8 I received an e-mail, addressing me by my registered name and stating the following:
“E-mailing tip: Showing your sense of humor is great, but sometimes it may not come across in e-mail. Be careful of sarcasm or a dry wit that doesn’t communicate with the printed word. You don’t want to give the wrong impression.”
In addition to having a poor sense of humor, GeorgetownSingles charges members to message each other-$19.95 for one month, or $44.95 for three. Friendster and CampusHook, on the other hand, understand that college students are not willing to pay the fees that other online services for older audiences often charge. We like things free-be it food, music or online services.
Perhaps some of GeorgetownSingles’ shortcomings can be attributed to the age of White Buffalo Ventures’ executives. Whereas Abramson of CampusHook is 22 and graduated from the University of Richmond this past May, White Buffalo’s CEO, Brad Armstrong is at least 40. While Abramson does not claim that CampusHook dominates the online college dating niche, he notes, “everybody affiliated with that company [White Buffalo Ventures] is my parents’ age. For someone that age to try and gear things towards the college age doesn’t work out very well.” His co-workers, on the other hand, are all 20-somethings, and two are currently college students.
So how did my own Friendster-made-real experience go once I stepped inside the coffeeshop? As I had suspected, John turned out to be not a creep, jerk, or bore, but a nice guy. We sat at a table near the window and in a perfect position to view a ceramic bird collection lined up in an exposed rafter above us. Painted red, the thick metal rafter housed quite an array of birds (although bluebirds seemed to dominate).
It was a bit odd to consider that before the initial hellos, we had never even heard each other’s voice. John had said he would call to set the plans, but instead Instant Messaged me, meaning all our pre-date contact was electronic. Our face-to-face conversation began with him politely making sure I had had little trouble finding the meeting place, Common Grounds, just a block or so from the Clarendon Metro stop in Arlington.
The shop-a former house- was popular, and filled with older couples, 20-somethings alone with laptops and a few young teens, the most conspicuous of whom was running around in ill-advised capri pants. Fortunately, John’s outfit indicated that he knew it was February, and included snug black pants, a snug black and white checked shirt, and a snug black and white sweater.
He had to brush his shaggy light brown hair out of his eyes as he asked me questions about my roommate, recently viewed films and favorite new music. Discussing the film Spellbound, we laughed when we discovered a shared nerdy history of involvement in spelling bees, information we hadn’t gleaned from each other’s Friendster profiles. When the topic of music came up, he fiddled with his cell phone and calmly described his take on the Walkmen, Preston School of Industry, the sold-out Shins shows this week, and the closing of several independent music stores in the District.
A week after receiving the original message from John, I had been browsing a friend’s playlist in i-Tunes and saw two songs under the band name “Metropolitan.” Realizing this was the band of which John’s profile proclaims him to be a member, I was taken back. Upon discussing it further, I learned that Metropolitan opened for D.C.’s much-loved Dismemberment Plan before the breakup of that group. Almost certainly blushing when I asked John about the band and frontman Travis, I was assured that they were not only great musicians, but rather charming individuals.
We were divided not only by the fact that he has a record deal while I am content listening to music, but also that John is 26, and I am in my final few days of being 19. Searching Friendster for college-age males from the D.C. area to meet up with for this experiment had proved to me that there is a pronounced lack of such individuals. Perhaps because John is not on the same corporate track of many others his age, the age difference did not seem to be as pronounced.
My final verdict? Whether a first date originates from meeting in person or online, several common threads persist. Short awkward pauses punctuated by nervous laughter are inevitable. A passing comment on the weather should be expected, and hesitation over an appropriate goodbye is practically requisite. Bundled up in winter coats outside of the coffeeshop, John and I hugged lightly and discussed getting together again. Whether or not I see him again, this “friendster,” a unique new breed of date, friend and acquaintance, has taught me that meeting people online really isn’t scary.
