On-line computer dating

[John B. Nagle]

Yellow-Phone, a company in the Bay Area, offers a dating service
accessable through a Touch-Tone telephone. For $25 one can sign up,
submit a profile of yourself and what you are looking for, and then
dial in and listen to the profiles of others; after each profile one
has the option of waiting for a phone number or keying a digit and
continuing on to the next profile. Each phone number you hear
costs $1.25; each call to the system costs $0.25, and with each call
you get 3 first names (spelled out) and profiles (spoken word by word
by a recorded-speech type voice output device).
It sounds like a good idea, but the outfit has a few problems.
The big one is that the male subscribers outnumber the female
subscribers by about five to one, even with free memberships for any
female under 30. This is expected, but they don't make any effort to
purge the database of old free subscribers, so there are a large number
of women on file who aren't looking.
Technically the system leaves a lot to be desired; pauses of a
minute or two are common. You can change your own profile and what
you are looking for through the keypad, but the manual for the system
is terrible and it is possible to get into states where no matches
can be found but you have no idea why. Worse, if you make some
criterion less restrictive (such as geographical area) all the names
you have already heard will be heard again at three names per phone call.
One amusing feature - once in a while when listening to a
profile, you hear something like ``Others say - the person exaggerates -
their - height''. One can tag the profiles of others with such
remarks if desired; this tends to keep profiles realistic.
It's cheap, it's fun, but it isn't very effective. A cute idea, though.

[isr...@umcp-cs.uucp]

There is a similar system in here in the D.C. area called the Georgetown
Exchange, except that it sounds like this one works a lot better (and is
also cheaper). Its not a computerized system, though. The way it works
is that for ten dollars you can record a one-minute tape of what you are
looking for and what your interests are. They have two phone numbers,
one which plays the women's tapes, and one for the men's tapes. They
are free to call up and listen to them and each tape comes with a box
number. If you want to reply to any, you write them a letter and put
it in a sealed envelope with the box number written on the outside.
You mail this envelope in a larger envelope to the Georgetown Exchange,
and you enclose a dollar for each letter. Its probably one of the
cheapest such things around; ten dollars to place an ad, one dollar to
reply to one, and its free to listen to the ads. They also have some
other deal where you can get a voice response box, so in addition to
getting letters, people can call up another number for free and leave
messages directly for that box. I assume that that is more expensive,
but I don't know how much (maybe one dollar for each message left?).

I've called them up a couple of times, just to listen. Its very
interesting. I can't tell you about the M/F ratio, but there are
usually plenty of women on the women's phone line. There seem to be
a predominance of women in the 32 - 60 age bracket, but there are more
than a few under that also. I've never replied to one, though there's
been an occasional tape that I've toyed with responding to.

Has anyone out there ever used one of these systems (or even the more
expensive video-dating services) or similar type things? What sort
of experiences did you have?
--

^-^ Bruce ^-^

University of Maryland, Computer Science
{rlgvax,seismo}!umcp-cs!israel (Usenet) israel.umcp-cs@CSNet-Relay (Arpanet)

[Greg Woods]

> It sounds like a good idea, but the outfit has a few problems.
> The big one is that the male subscribers outnumber the female
> subscribers by about five to one, even with free memberships for any
> female under 30.

> ......

> It's cheap, it's fun, but it isn't very effective. A cute idea, though.

Sounds like the video dating service I tried a year or so ago, and also
net.singles, come to think of it!

GREG
--
{ucbvax!hplabs | allegra!nbires | decvax!kpno | harpo!seismo | ihnp4!kpno}
!hao!woods

[Greg Woods]

I once belonged to a video dating club. It suffered from all the same
problems as trying to meet people through the net. For one, there weren't
enough women (why is this always the case? Isn't the population 50% female?
:-) For another, it was $75 for men and $10 for women. Psychologically,
I just hate feeling ripped off. Lastly, both times I actually met a woman
this way, she eventually told me she didn't believe we had enough in common
to have a friendship. Personally, I think that is a crock and was probably
a euphemism for something else (like "I don't find you attractive"), but that
isn't the point. The point is that it was a sufficiently unpleasant experience
that when my membership ran out I didn't renew.