Or alternatively “I have 2861 friends on Facebook and I still can’t find anyone to Shag”
17th Nov 2009 – I was having lunch with an old friend of mine who works at a Venture fund in London the other day. I was telling him about what we are up to at Dating Factory and how well things are moving along for us.
Of course working for a Venture Fund, he is an “expert” on every single aspect of every technology on the internet. His throw away comment was that Social Networks such as Facebook or StudiVZ will ultimately kill the dating sites as they are free. There are precedents of course, the original community, Friends Reunited went from being the biggest social network on the planet to irrelevance in a matter of months after they asked people to pay to be a member.
My argument is that Facebook is where you have your public face and your current friends; it’s not where you look for a date. If you could get a date with one of your Facebook connections you probably would have.
If you are looking for a date, sooner or later you are going to have to look outside your circle of friends. Needing a date is also a very private thing and Facebook is a very public place. This need for privacy is greatly heightened when you move into the Casual Dating or Niche Dating arena; it’s not everyone who is looking for an affair that wants everyone at his company in the City of London to know about it. It’s not every transvestite that wants the rest of Parliament to know about it. Anything that moves slightly outside of the accepted norms for behaviour has to be kept private.
At the end of our lunch in SoHo we walked out of the restaurant to be confronted by a sign advertising a book in a small book shop. This book had the excellent if a little long title “I have 2861 friends on Facebook and I still can’t find anyone to Shag”.
As we both looked at it and laughed I was left with the only obvious comment, “I rest my case”!!
Mark Harrison