The expanding world of online dating
These days so much about having a successful online dating website is down to having an original idea – something that really stands out. I remember my first online dating experience back in 2001 when, believe it or not, there were only a few online dating sites around, they were all free and finding love on the internet was still a bit of a novelty thing that made people around you arch their eyebrows.
Soon after that dating sites started popping up like mushrooms after a rainfall. Fast forward ten years and we are in a situation where there are literally thousands of dating sites out there and the users are not only faced with one difficult choice: who to date, but also another: which site to use.
Of course, partly that’s why we are here. We have created this site to make it easier for you to orientate between all the best and biggest websites out there so that users would know what they’re paying for and what they can expect to get on those sites. But obviously we cannot review them all! But if you just wander around a bit in the online world of dating sites you can come across the most inventive and original websites that clearly show how the human mind has no boundaries when it comes to coming up with clever ideas…
Shared Tables Society
Take Shared Tables Society, for example. It’s a relatively small site and when you visit their site you can see why. It works on the basis of invitation only! Yes, it means there are not hundreds of thousands of users but it also means there are no scammers, no timewasters. Everyone there is there for a reason. What Shared Tables does is unique: it matches you up for dinner dates. So what, you ask, there are a few dating sites that do that already. Yes, but STS matches you up with seven (sic!) dinner dates. Four guys and four girls will sign up for dinner, the site books a table for them in a restaurant, they show up, they have a good time, hopefully make friends, maybe even click with someone and… the rest is history. It certainly does save you from all these awkward first date moments and possible dating horror stories that we wrote about last week.
cheek’d
Or take Cheek’d – a new website that advertises itself as ‘online dating in reverse’. Each new user fills in their profile and gets an order of business cards with funny/weird/puzzling sayings on them. All the cards also have a short ID code printed on them with Cheek’d website address. If you meet someone you like, all you have to do is to give them the card and wait for them to pick up the bate. Hopefully they’re intrigued enough to check out the website and if they do, they get to a page where they have to enter the ID code on the card. Once they’ve done that they’ll be taken through to your personal profile page and move on from there.
Coffee Meets Bagel
Then there’s Coffee Meets Bagel, another site with a new approach. On this site everyone signs in through their Facebook page – which, again, makes the scammers scarce. Then they are matched every day at noon with a friend of a friend through their social network. Users have 24 hours to decide whether they want to take it further.
That’s just three completely new and fresh outlooks to an online dating website out there but I think you get the picture: online dating is getting more an more popular by the minute. With the opportunities out there the chances of you actually finding love online are huge! You just need to find the right place to look for it.
About the Author
Aet Suvari has been reviewing and writing about the world of online dating since 2008 and the launch of Online Dating Help. A stickler for promoting ethical practices within the UK dating industry she champions the sites that get it right while highlighting those holding it back. You can follow her on Google+
