Why did I do this? The lack of people.

Living in a town made up mostly of students and with a population of about 200,000 OkCupid simply did not provide the number of people needed for me to want to continue with this smaller online dating site. While in a big city, even the smaller sites will still have a lot of good guys and girls; smaller places can’t say the same thing. I think my effort is best spent focused on the single largest dating site, PlentyOfFish.com.

I think to continue using an online dating site the most important thing, beyond functionality, beyond cost, beyond everything else is people. Without the people everything else is pretty pointless.

Now one might say, “Why not just use a bunch of the smaller sites?”, “Smaller means less competition for the hotties.” and they would be right. However, I don’t want to spent too much time each day checking a bunch of online sites. I prefer to check one site maybe once a week and lets things come and go as they may. No pressure and little maintenance.

What do you think?

PS. Happy fishing.

Plenty of Bigger Fish - Before and After

Installing It

The program only works in Firefox and Flock, so I apologise to anyone using Internet Explorer.  You need to install two things to make it go:  the program itself, and an add-on to Firefox called Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey can be installed from Mozilla Addons.

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 (Press Add to Firefox)

The script can be found at userscripts.org, along with a whole bunch of other great user scripts for Facebook, GMail, and the like.

userscripts.org/scripts/show/43619 (Press Install)

Can I Trust This?

Absolutely yes.  If you’re technically savvy, you can actually inspect exactly what the script is doing.  Install it and try it out.  Any and all comments are welcome.

OK Pictures! OK Matching! OK Go!

OKCupid is definitely different than any other website I’ve seen or used.  It’s focus is on pretty serious test-based matchmaking, rather than finding.

Pictures are incredibly important on a dating website, and the handling of pictures in OKCupid is great. In the profile views, you see the picture of the persons face, cropped from the larger picture.  But no worry, the larger picture is available in more detailed views.  The pictures are large, the compression is low, so your lovely mug comes out looking far more crisp and vivid than on other dating websites.

A theme appears when browsing through pictures – it’s a young population.  Not yuppie young, college young.  Sweet?  Unfortunately I couldn’t’ figure out a way to hide my profile, so that’s almost a deal breaker for long-term use.  Youth and secrets aside, the focus of the dating process is not random, local browsing, nor detailed searching.  Instead, the focus is this matching paradigm that uses your answers to a seemingly infinite number of questions as written by other users.  Your answer is recorded, as well as the preferred answer of your “ideal match.”

Smart.  While this sounds very interesting, it’s … actually not that great.  The method is cool, for sure, but some of the question content is randomly poor.  People just don’t seem to ask the important questions (often enough at least) that you’d need to assess actual compatibility.  The answers result in a “match % / friend % / enemy %” rating. (Enemy?) The majority of the 80+ questions that I answered fell into these categories:  sex, cheating, boundaries of monogamy, and patriotism.  So, things that young dating minds are interested in debating with other young, horny, cheated-on minds.

And there-in lies the reality of OKCupid:  it’s great for really engaged, survey-clicking people.  It very much feels like MySpace: chaotic, involved, and highly personal.  Its chaos and pace may be very attractive to some – those people should also check out WooMe and Iminlikewithyou.

The Important Things

Perhaps the thing that the architects of OKCupid want to avoid with their question/answer setup is over-specification of searches (which deserves a post to itself) … especially things that may not actually matter as much as we think they do: education, income, having a car, religious affiliation, blah blah blah.  And the matching obviously does end in success stories,

But ultimately I was upset about not being asked the most important question front and centre – what am I looking for, and for how long.  A date, a relationship, a wife, a lay?  For now, for the next little bit, for ever? We’re not entirely sure exactly as to what our answer to “Would you consider a threesome with two people, if you really liked one more, but they came as a pair?” is, or what we’d like to hear our mate respond with.  “What are you looking for?” is a question that is fundamental at some of the competing websites – and I think it’s a model that more accurately reflects my reasons for dating.

That being said, I want to end this review on a high note as OKCupid does look, feel, and interact far better than almost any other dating site I’ve used.  OKCupid does a lot of other things really, really well:  it’s engaging, fun, Web 2.0-ish, uses floaty menus (ooh, ahh), and the image support is once again worth noting.  If you can overlook that you can’t really filter your results by “fling” or “long-term,” this site kicks the interactivity up a notch.

I think it’s a sign of maturity when you can honestly understand that a relationship won’t work, and move on to greener pastures with a sense of confidence and integrity.

But sweet merciful Jesus forbid that I make my internet dating profile public.  Yeah, no fucking way, public profile, pffft, whatever.

I don’t want that text message: “hey so ur on plentyoffish already.  cool, good luck.”  From anyone, especially not from her.

Really, I’d prefer that nobody know I’m looking to date other than the people whom I message. I don’t want to respond to messages from people I’m not interested in – and I don’t want the guilt of not responding when their message is obviously well thought-out (not that I get [m]any random messages).

Now despite having six to ten pictures of myself and my close inner circle of friends prominently posted and cropped, my real name (or initials) do not appear anywhere on the already secret profile.  There are people who put their real names as their user names, plaster their names on their profile, and tell others to check them out on Facebook – I can’t be one of them: way too Google-able.  I don’t want the added pressure of having to revise my internet history.

This is why my profile is hidden: I don’t want anything.  Anything, other than a date.