A brief history of online dating

The introduction and singles dating industry is not new. In fact, dating and singles clubs have been around for many years. Bob Hope said in the early 1950's, "I once sent my photograph to a Lonely Hearts club and they sent it back saying, thanks but we are not that lonely". The Lonely Hearts club image lasted nearly as long as Bob Hope himself and was the butt of many comedians' jokes, which gave the dating industry an image that only desperate and lonely people join such clubs.

The internet has changed many things and nowhere has it had a larger impact than with the dating industry. Online dating websites started to bring a younger audience to the dating and singles matchmaking industry, where these systems would conveniently email you people in your area who were also looking to meet other single people. The fact that these early sites, as many poor quality sites still do today, would simply collect as many photographs as possible and send them to you, would frequently result in you opening your email only to have a photo staring out at you that could scare a police horse.

The better quality online dating sites such as chancetomeet.com, have highly developed searches and tools such as "connect phrases" to help you find the right person. There is good evidence that the sites that charge for membership have a much higher quality of contact, with the more you pay the more serious the member. Free sites or sites that charge a nominal amount tend to attract the "one night stand" end of the market and tend to have page after page of contacts that you have to trawl through with little or no information about that person, apart from the fact they like holidays, nice people and watching the X factor, with dislikes of people who bring an axe on the first date!

The future of online dating, whether you are looking for the chance to meet a long term partner, or maybe looking for something more casual, does seem to be assured, as the high divorce rate and number of people staying single looks set to continue globally in the years to come.

However, things are about to change in the future of online dating, just as dating changed with the advent of the internet. Only this time it may be even more of a revolution, as computers get faster along with Internet connection speeds. These advances will bring more exciting ways to date and meet people as social networking sites have recently shown. As computer graphics improve, we will see Virtual reality start to become the norm in online dating. Chancetomeet.com has been developing technologies in this area ready to take advantage of faster computing power and are preparing to launch these new services in the near future. To keep up to date why not register for free at www.chancetomeet.com and who knows what the future may bring.

Author: Paul Burke is part of the http://Chancetomeet.com development team and started working in the computer industry some 30 years ago with IBM main frames.

- baLooT Inc 2007 -