Personal Accounts

Online Dating Background Checks: Coming Soon?!

From CNN Online, a news story about online dating and state legislation being considered to protect daters from predators.  Gone are the days of buyer beware.  You aren't going to screen out bad manners, but a criminal record is something you should definately be aware of.

A few states could soon help save the lovelorn from heartbreak. According to Monday's Los Angeles Times, a handful of state legislatures around the country are mulling legislation that would require online dating sites such as Match.com and Yahoo Personals to conduct background checks on all members, or prominently warn users that they do not.

Bills pending in Michigan, Florida, and Texas would generally order online dating services to uncover criminal felony convictions and post that information or bar the convicts from their sites, according to the newspaper. A similar bill introduced in California was pulled this year and an Ohio legislator plans to introduce one soon.

None of the legislative proposals has passed yet. But the Times noted that a law in one state could extend nationwide because of the challenges applying local rules to the Web.

The Times also pointed out that the call for background checks comes at a time when state and federal legislators are demanding that less personal information be available online. The paper cited recent security breaches at ChoicePoint Inc. and Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis.

The idea of mandatory background checks has touched off an impassioned debate.

Privacy advocates and most online dating services, including Match.com owner IAC/Interactive Corp. and Yahoo Personals owner Yahoo!, Inc., oppose the legislative effort, the Times said. Match.com and Yahoo Personals are the No. 1 and No. 2 online dating sites, respectively.

But rival service True.com not only supports the idea, but is actively lobbying for the bills' passage.

True.com, the fifth-largest online matchmaker, already conducts background checks on its members. Founder and CEO Herb Vest defended his campaign by noting that incidents of violence and fraud have occurred on dating sites.

"The primary motivation is to protect people from criminal predation online," Vest told the newspaper. "I can't imagine anyone with a hatful of brains being against that."

Internet users themselves are reportedly split on the issue. One consumer said she didn't see the harm while another objected to the government's intrusion on matters of the heart.

Top Five Online Dating Sites

1. Match.com
2. Yahoo Personals
3. eHarmony
4. American Singles
5. True.com

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Improving the State of the Date:  Safey/Honesty

New on Oprah: Marriage+Kids=No Sex Drive

I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen the show myself.  I nearly fell of the treadmill watching Oprah this week.  The secret is a secret no more.  American women after marriage and babies have no interest in sex with their husbands.   Not only did they not keep it a secret, they were openly hostile to a woman who actually had the nerve to say her relationship with her husband was more important than her kids.  Blasphemy!

Ayelet Waldman wrote an essay based on her observation that many mothers that she came in contact with focused all of their love and attention to their children, to the detriment of their husbands.  She openly claimed that she loved her children but was not in love with them, and cautioned women to keep their relationship a priority in their lives.

The response was "there will be time for him once the children are gone".  Now I am all for being good parents to the generation who will follow us, but this near sighted attitude is a recipe for disaster.  There is no wonder the divorce rate is so high in the United States.  A ring on your finger is not a life long contract, and married women, if you feel tired now, try it as a single mother, ladies.

Resources

www.ayeletwaldman.com

Oprah Episode Guide

Finding an Old Crush Online

NEW YORK

(CNN/Money) - There she was, just like I remembered her. Sure, 29 years older, but she had that same smile. And the same curly, blonde hairstyle. I'd spent many an algebra class staring at that hair.

Now, thanks to the Internet, I was staring at it again.

Hey, it was an honest bit of curiosity. I saw her name on a speaker list for an Internet technology conference and wondered "Could that be the same ...?"

So I Googled. I found a few biographies, but oddly enough none mentioned what junior high school she attended. Then I found a picture of her giving a speech at the previous year's conference. Sigh. Junior high school crush reborn ... virtually.

I'm not alone (No, I'm not talking about the crush thing). Lots of people look up other people on the Internet. And we're not just talking old girlfriends and drinking buddies either. Job applicants and other blind dates get looked up too.

"If you look at it in the broadest sense, it seems to be a very, very common activity," said Jim Jansen, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who has been studying Internet trends.

The question is... the question we always have around here ... can you make money off it?

An outfit called Ziggs.com is trying. It's essentially a database of profiles, mainly company bios scraped off the Net, but you can custom make one too.

The site is ostensibly designed to help people make professional or business connections. Makes sense. There's already enough dating sites out there.

"You can use a professional profile for a professional connection or a personal connection, but you can't use a personal profile for a professional connection," said Ziggs CEO Tim DeMello. "You don't use your Match.com account for business."

Ziggs makes money by connecting names or company rosters listed in its database with various searches on Google and Yahoo. For example, if you are a chickenhawk expert in Topeka, for $50 a year you can have your name pop up on the big engines if someone types in "chickenhawk expert in Topeka."

On a basic level, it's the contextual search model using people instead of products.

Business has been so good, said DeMello, that the site now lets people maintain custom profiles for free (it used to be you got charged $25 after the first year). But it's not yet cash-flow positive -- that's over a year away, said DeMello.

And at a little over 2 million profiles, Ziggs.com is still a tiny place in the 150 million Internet user universe. DeMello believes 10 million will be the site's tipping point into the Internet big leagues. According to comScore Media Metrix, that's just under where the ubiquitous "Classmates" sites are now.

At its current growth rate, he expects it to be there in about two years. That assumes, of course, one of the big boys (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) doesn't decide it wants to jostle Ziggs for some of its action.

For you money-hungry types who want to relive the 1990s and throw money into a fledgling Internet venture, give up. It's privately held.

But if you are interested in looking up an expert or two, it's not bad. It would have been useful to me a couple of weeks ago, when I needed a goldfish expert. However, it didn't bring up the one I found through good old reporter asking around.

And it doesn't bring up some of the juicy stuff you really like to know about people. On Ziggs, you get a nice, sterile, profile. On Google, you may get some dirt, or at least insults. Google me, for example, and you get treated to all the blogs that think I'm an idiot.

Yeah, there's a place for people search. Not sure anyone has the right combination yet. But at least you can get a glimpse of old heart throbs from time to time.

Mentioned Websites
ziggs.com

A lesson learned the hard way?

From the Curious Mind of Michael Kesterton, The Globe and Mail

In Britain, a new service aimed at druken cellphone users will block numbers of ex-lovers and bosses, or anyone else that the owner might be tempted to harangue while squiffy, reports The Independent.  With Virgin Mobile's Dialling Under the Influence, a person dials 333, followed by the number of theperson he or she wishes to bar later--and is then prevented from unleashing an embarrassing tirade until morning.