Jonas Luster, self-described—social scientist, technocrat, and sometimes-coder—posted some early findings on a interview study that he has conducted recently.

In this study participants were gathered from a number of different match-making services including match.com, matchmaker.com, tickle.com (formerly Emode), Yahoo! Personals, and LavaLife.com—1404 individuals were surveyed, 835 male, 569 female.

Jonas gives a readout on some preliminary findings, (along with this warning "Preliminary notes on research findings on online matchmaking, unpublished, unreviewed, 2004") and I will not review them all here, as you can peruse at—Finding Your Sweetheart Online.

What I did want to include here is the "ideal" types that, according to Jonas' study have a higher than usual (> 35 percent) chance of actually finding a match online:

Males:
Masters degree or higher
Income of $100,000/year or higher
Between 5'9" and 6'5"
"Athletic and toned" or "slim"
Non-smoker
Moderate or regular drinker
Short hair
No children
Never been married

Females:
High-school or higher
Income irrelevant
Between 5'4" and 5'9"
"Athletic and toned" or "curvy"
Non-smoker
Moderate or occasional drinker
Long hair
No children or "children but not at home"
Former relationships irrelevant

Interesting disparity in expectations between genders… /-:=

In a few weblog comments and IRC conversations, Jonas and I have been chatting about what constitutes a Social Networking Service. A large number of YASNS in my Social Networking Meta List, support a social network of "1", and occasionally two or more—in fact many Orkut members have only one and the occasional zero declared connections.

Martha Graybow in an article for Reuters—Livewire: Personality Tests Proliferate on the Web—includes a reflection by Tickle's company founder and Chief Executive James Currier: "The idea behind Tickle is to tap into people's favorite subject: themselves."

Is displaying one's profile to a group on a dating service, or any other service, sans the ability to map the nodes or connections one is making—Social Networking? Or are these services simply vehicles for detailed advertisments on our favorite subject: Ourselves?