Insights into e-dating

More and more people are meeting their future spouses online - in social-networking sites, matchmaking sites, and even online games such as SecondLife.com (with nearly 80,000 players worldwide). Some of us baby-boomers and Gen X-ers are among them, so of course more of our children will be. The Indianapolis Star cites Pew Internet & American Life figures showing that one-sixth of Internet users 18-29 using online dating sites (only 1 in 20 older Net users do). In kind of an online chat format (a little more wordy), the Star article lets Tammy Paolino (formerly njbarefootpoet) and Jeffrey Taylor (formerly jtay999) tell the story of how they met and got to know each other at Match.com in late 2001 - offering insights into why it worked so much better for them than, say, nightclubs and parties - and how males and females navigate the online-dating scene differently (using Jeff's Frank Zappa T-shirt as an example). "They married in October 2002 and recently celebrated the first birthday of their son, Jonah." The Star piece has a sidebar linking to a number of online dating sites, though teenagers are more likely to socialize at sites like eCrush.com, Bolt.com, Hookup.com, or blogging spots like MySpace or Xanga. For more on the Second Life and Teen Second Life games, including the romantic parts, see "Lively alternative lives." There's also recent news of online-dating site users, in separate cases, suing Match.com and Yahoo Personals for fraud - see CNET.