We realize that not everyone is spends their days surfing the web and the city for the latest and greatest stories (that’s our job, your’s is to read), but we can’t help but wonder if anyone else has noticed that dating sites have started popping up in the most random of places.
Since January, both Eater.com and NYMag.com have launched their own dating portals.Now, on it’s own it doesn’t seem that strange; Eater is a blog about food and most first dates involve dinner and a movie (despite our protests) and NYMag is all about New York, where said dates take place. But it gets stranger when you see that both dating sites launched within days of each other: Eater on January 18, NYMag two days later.There’s a common thread, of course: both were launched in partnership with How About We.
What’s that?
Now, we’ve mentioned the folks at How About We before. In fact they’re the ones who wondered aloud whether New Yorkers were too lazy to date outside of their own borough. (So you know we’re fans of their dating trends blog.) But we’ve never quite taken a look at their dating services. What makes it different from say the awful land of sadness and fear that is OkCupid or PlentyofFish?
Well, according to How About We it’s all about the first date. Instead of spending hours crafting the greatest profile only to have it ignored because you don’t have a picture, on How About We you pose a date idea and people can reject you respond based on that.
So what do people think about it?
It’s reviews seem to be pretty positive. Urban Dater liked the idea of focusing on dates, not profiles:
There’s a large emphasis on doing interesting things on your date. I think that focus is what makes ‘How About We…’ shine. Everyone can post date ideas and other users can show their approval for the data, thus, it really makes it easy to find like-minded people to do something interesting. Don’t believe me? Here’s a few dates that really stick out to me:
- Donate blood and reward ourselves with a burger afterward
- Have a couple of pumpkin beers now that it’s socially acceptable
- Rent a convertible for the day and drive around the town with the top down.
With that said, How About We is still a pay service, and we’re not sure that the snarky blog commenter crowd is going to really be keen on paying to date other members of the snarky blog commenter crowd. Still, that these sites have partnered with How About We speaks to how popular and, well, normal online dating has become. It seems like it’s no longer the place that sad people go to get find other sad people.
And hell, there are so many options and so much money at stake that sites have popped up to rate these online dating services. You’ve got the aforementioned Urban Dater, and then you’ve got Consumer-Rankings.com, which has compiled a list of the best online dating websites. They’re pretty thorough too, as you can see from their review of Match.com. How About We hasn’t made the list yet, but judging by their rate of expansion we imagine that’ll change pretty soon.
