Most dating sites are technologically from the stone age. Admittedly, most of them are capable to narrow your search on certain „hard“ criteria, like sex, age span, geographical location, type of interest etc. But then they expect you to email every single one of the found matches yourself, which is extremely time-consuming and carries the inconvenience of being rejected multiple times and thus „losing face“.
Orkut has a feature called the „crush list“. You enter every person whose profile you have checked and whom you are interested in, in the „crush list“, but this list is kept secret. Only when there is a match between two people having entered each other in their own „crush list“, i.e. both people have a mutual interest in each other, then both people get notified automatically. This way the risk of being rejected and losing face is reduced to a minimum.
I suggest a feature to present all people matching said certain „hard criteria“, like sex, age span, geographical location, type of interest etc., with those people having entered you in their crush list getting presented preferably, but still hidden between people not knowing you, thus not revealing indirectly their interest in you. People who have seen your profile and decided not being interested in you, should be excluded from the selection. The presentation should be executed like a dia show, while giving you the opportunity, after looking at the profile of one person, to express with a mouse click if you are interested in them or not.
Furthermore, you should be given opportunity to enter a price for how much money you would be willing to satisfy the other person’s interest in you, if he or she was interested in you. This would make both the work of prostitutes and the selection process of their customers easier and more convenient, as the prostitute could easily deselect certain customers without rejecting them openly and the customers would not risk getting rejected.
So what is needed to implement this idea in the real world? I propose setting up a new service, where you can enter a profile, like at so many others and where you can also enter the „hard criteria“ for the people you are looking for. Furthermore it stores your „crush status“ about any other person, which can be either „want“ or „not want“. You may also set as an option that other people can inspect your crush status on them on request. The service lets you search for „hard“ matches, with people having a crush on you mixed in preferably. Last, but not least, it sends out notifications about mutual crushes, but lets members decide if and how they want to receive this info, in order to avoid annoying particularly popular people and possibly drive them away.
But how do people from the real world ever come to use this site? By use of a small button to be placed on profiles of people anywhere else to click on if they have a crush on you. This web button could be placed on personal home pages or profiles in web communities like orkut, facebook etc. or anywhere else on the web. The button has written „I have a crush on this person“ on it and one can choose between a „secret“ crush, and an „open“ crush, the latter being revealed on request to all people who want to know if you had a crush on them or not. The button would then send the info to the above-mentioned service. If the clicker hasn’t registered yet, he or she would be invited, too, with the option of not supplying a full profile but merely one single piece of info allowing to identify them, like their email-address. Members without a profile would then never be included in a presentation.
The concept of „crush lists“ has also been implemented by the site „Crush space“, but very poorly. This site seems mostly deserted now. It is easy to understand why: There is no connection to the outer world, no support is being provided for people who want to lure web surfers from anywhere else to this service, with one mouse-click. Furthermore people whom others have had a crush on, get always notified by email, which can be prohibitively annoying to popular members.
