My avatar really thought your avatar was charming but...

Forgive me if I cast a skeptical eye towards omnidate.com Its a free dating service that allows members to browse profiles in the traditional way, but then here is the extra special hook, instead of trading emails or meeting in person you can ask people on a virtual date. Apparently, avatars can flirt, blow kisses and roll their eyes etc. Is it just me or is something weird about gussying up your avatar and sending them on a hot date with the avatar of your potential new love while your actual self is sitting in a dinner stained t-shirt and ill fitting sweat pants. I know, I know, I'm a little jaded but really I have a hard time seeing how 2 idealized versions of self meeting in some idealized realm can equal love in the plain old real world. It is the same reason The Bachelor never actually marries the final rose recipient(yes, I know except for Kristin and Ryan, but thats different.) For more info check out this article, it seems that people disagree with me.


Also, the feelings of intimacy (if there could be any) one might feel after allowing their avatars to pour out digitized versions of heart felt emotion probably won't translate to the real world and that reminded me about this current.com video about texting and love.

Another Robot Learns to Feel

I Want You to Want Me is a project by by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar commissioned by MoMa Ny for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. The piece is an interactive art work that gathers information from ever accumulating online dating profiles and organizes that info into an achingly hopeful visual system.



and if you liked that check out We Feel Fine, an earlier project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, that mined the web for the phrase "I feel."

Who said computers don't have hearts...

Baring it All Online

Deciding when to unlink from a sig. other's blog or when to un-friend them on your various social networks is always a touchy topic. Everyone is guilty of a little internet snooping on a lost love at some point or other. So why not quit with the pretending and let that spurned loved one know exactly whats going on. Post it on your blog, uploaded it to youtube, embed it in every comment box from here to kingdom come. I'm just kidding that is no way to behave... but it was pretty funny when Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel did it:

A picture is worth a thousand words. Really?

The new online dating site Jiffr.com says "to hell with words we have pictures." In my mind I am flipping through the ridiculously plentiful profile pictures of myself littering the web. What am I saying with them I wonder? I would never ever ever put a picture of myself anywhere that wasn't flattering. In fact flattering is an understatement the only pictures I post are exceptional (for me.) So exceptional in fact that they fail at being accurate representations of me. Even the pictures that I am not physically in tend to serve the purpose of constructing my idealized life. So, Jiffr.com, the new image based dating site made me raise an eyebrow. Can you meet someone in the idealized image world and fall in love with the non-idyllic real them?

Here is the basic idea: You select 9 mate wooing photos from your Flickr account to represent you on Jiffr. Then you browse the photo selections of others and decide who you want to date. Then, if anyone you selected as date worthy also selects you, you'll receive an email on Thursday that schedules a date on Saturday at a preselected location. The emailing is all automated, so if you change your mind or need to reschedule its over-- your chance with that person is gone.



I haven't tried it out yet but plan on bullying one of my single friends into giving it a go. I just wonder how well the matches will work. On one hand it sounds like fun. Sort of like a mystery- where you leave little image clues about yourself and try to decipher someone else's. But then again its superficial nature makes me cringe. When the tag line of the site is "get a date without words" I have to wonder what in the world will you talk about on the date.