YOU HAD
ME @ LOL
Best of all, because Coster and
Basile both use Twitter for work,
neither of them had to go anywhere, fill out anything, carve
out time to exchange flirty messages, or pay a cent to meet.
Not only do singles benefit from
the convenience of searching for
love through social networks,
but they’re spared the emotional
baggage associated with taking
the plunge to join an OKCupid
or Chemistry.com for a lovelife intervention.
Some old-school dating sites are
actually trying to ape social media’s
accidental success in the field.
Basile’s old haunt reflects the
sea change in online dating with
“ONLINE DATING TO
ME IS NOT ONLINE
DATING ANYMORE.
IT’S SOCIAL DATING
AND IT’S A SOCIAL
EXPERIENCE.”
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
a design that borrows more from
Twitter than eHarmony: Nerve.
com has reinvented Nerve Dating to take a cue from the Foursquares and Facebooks of the
world and has supplemented the
traditional checklists, algorithms
and profiles with brief user status updates a la Facebook meant
to serve as icebreakers.
“Social media sites do a better
job of approximating the natural human experience than dating sites in their old form,” says
Nerve chief executive Sean Mills.
“Social media had a huge influence on us in figuring out that
the idea of sharing actively would
work in a space designed for
meeting new people.”
For their part, it’s unlikely social
media sites will do much to encourage matchmaking on their sites.
“It’s going to start to offend
other people…You do get typecast
into a certain category — Pinterest is for women, this one’s for
that, this one is for casual sex
— and I don’t know that you can
be all things to everyone on any
single social networking site,” says
Spira, the online dating expert.
But that doesn’t matter. There
are plenty of places to
find love online.