Lately, I've been conjuring up all sorts of ideas for what you can with del.icio.us. A lightweight tool distributed across an active internet userbase can be a very powerful and very interesting thing. Fred and I have been using it a lot to search. For example, you can go to del.icio.us/tag/restaurants+nyc if you're looking for someplace good to eat. The good thing about del.icio.us, rather than a citysearch or something like that is that unless someone finds it worthwhile enough to remember, it probably won't be on there--so the crap is already screened out to some extent.
Anyway, while I was at the Boathouse today, I was talking about dating with someone and I came up with an idea. What about distributed dating via del.icio.us? The problem with dating sites is that its hard to tell which ones you should use, and they're all so closed off. Not everyone is on Match or Friendster or MySpace or whatever. A metasearch that crawls all the dating sites might be ok, but at the end of the day, you'll still need to pay to talk to people, regardless of whether or not those people wind up being worth talking to.
So let's take back our personal lives with a little good ole fashioned self-tagging. Basically, it will work like this. Pick any page, preferably a page that someone can access (as opposed to one behind a pay dating site) and tag it dateme with del.icio.us. If you don't know how to use del.icio.us yet, kick on the Pimp My Web box on my menubar. I have some screencasts on how to get started.
Now, we'll need some way to search people, so I suggest you go by 10 year age groups and gender. How about location, too? Now, certain cities have really obvious abbreviations, like NYC is obviously NYC. Same with San Francisco. If you're not sure, just put your two letter state abbreviation. So, for me, I would tag my post as follows:
dateme 20s male nyc ny
If you were a woman in her 30's from San Fransisco, you'd tag yourself:
dateme 30s female sf ca
And the same thing goes for searches. So for me, I'll be watching the del.icio.us/tag/dateme+20s+female+nyc page and its corresponding RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/dateme+20s+female+nyc.
Inherent problems with this? Well, first of all, the del.icio.us user population, similar to the blogger population, is probably male dominated. So, we need guys out there getting their female friends up with del.icio.us and a blog page. What needs to happen there I think is that some newspaper or maybe Gothamist or something needs to pick up this story and encourage people to do it.
The cool thing is that you can setup your page, tag it, even tag it anonymously, and no one would even know that you were doing it. So, you could just be writing a blog, and tagging yourself for this distributed dating system, and you wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of someone at work finding you on match or anything like that... unless they were literally on del.icio.us looking for exactly your type of profile.
So, I'll be tagging this post and seeing what comes of it. Anyone who reads this, forward this to your single friends and get them up on del.icio.us if they aren't already. If nothing else, this is going to be an interesting experiment: The del.icio.us distributed dating experiment... starting with one silly blogger--a blogger that appreciates openminded, ambitious women who like the outdoors, movies, cooking and being cooked for, and baseball. (Just in case this actually works.)
So... who's with me?? Tag yourselves "dateme"!!