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Hooking Up Online: The State of MySpace, Facebook, and Other Horrors

By Mark Coates ⋅ July 22, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

It’s 11pm on a Saturday night and you are on Facebook MySpace Adult Friend Finder.  Again.

The urge strikes to browse users.  Hmm.  Female.  27-32.  Within 20 miles.  Must like spicy Thai food, Apple tattoos, and recursive jokes… glasses are good.  (click!)

You know you’ve done it.

We all do.  Now the question comes — have you hooked up with someone from a chance electron collision in cyberspace?

“The definition of hooking up depends on the person defining it,” FSU junior Amanda Weedall said.

Lots of people are doing it nowadays.  Ahem.

Hooking up online, that is.

It’s becoming quite the trend.  Gone are the days of smoky bars and chain letters leading to back-alley lonelyhearts clubs.  This brave new world is neon and chrome.

Instead we have banner graphics and flashing logos.

Myspace is YourSpace is MySpace

I have to admit to having relationships that were facilitated by MySpace.  It’s just so easy to find a person with the same interests, sense of humor, and style as you — given the malleability of the MySpace template and the cluster-fuck it has become due to embedded scripts and stupid people.  It’s at very least easy to spot someone without any geek skills.

And no skillz is no sexy.

Then there are the horror stories, the near-mythical situations that urban legends are made of.

Someone responds to a job ad on craigslist and ends up having their murder video-taped by some psycho death recruiter.  (I think I might option that screenplay now.)  Or people auctioning off corpses or organs online getting busted by the Feds.  How sick will it get?

Have your say in our informal poll…  Leave comments about your horror or happy story.  Jump in!

Update: I’ve received some interesting email (unfortunately nothing I can publish) since I put up this post.  Let me add that I am in a satisfying personal relationship with a beautiful, geeky girl.  So, I am taken.  Flattered, but taken. ;-)  Also, I’ve never actually logged into Adult Friend Finder, but I have heard stories…  *blushing*