With sites like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals offering pages of photos of attractive women and buff guys bragging about their cooking skills, online dating long ago shed its stigma as a refuge for the horny but socially challenged. So how’s a poor geek supposed to get a date?
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Gk2gk.com, which he runs out of his River North condo, went up in April. As with most such sites, the prospective client fills out a list of questions about race, age, religion, and what he or she is looking for in a mate. But on gk2gk.com there’s a section for users to indicate whether they prefer Unix or Linux, a PC or Mac, and multiple-choice queries about their favorite branch of science (physics, chemistry, or math?), authors (Douglas Adams or J.R.R. Tolkien? Philip K. Dick or J.K. Rowling?), and calculators (Hewlett-Packard or Texas Instruments?). There’s also a message board with a few posts, most a month or two old and one of them written in Greek, and “fun pages,” mostly lists like the “Top Ten Ways to Tell If You’re a Geek.” You can buy a Geek 2 Geek pocket protector to signal your allegiance and availability. But aside from some scattered stock images of people with bad haircuts and questionable fashion sense–including ubergeek Bill Gates–there aren’t any photos, nor will there ever be. The home page tells (or warns) prospective members as much: “If you’re interested in finding someone based on looks, go elsewhere. There is no appearance information on profiles (no pictures either), true geeks just don’t care.”
Web design is apparently not a priority for geeks either: the site features lavender backgrounds, Times New Roman, and a logo that looks like it dates from the Tron era. There are also a few bugs: When I filled out a profile so I could poke around the site, a sentence suggesting that I was a fan of pro wrestling somehow ended up in my description. A keyword search didn’t pull up any profiles, nor can you search for a specific user name. But since Koppel offers the service for free, he doesn’t stress about such things. “At some point along the way, once we get all the bugs out of it and it’s a really good site, we may have to charge for premium services or something like that,” he says.
Though he says he’s not seriously looking, Koppel has his own profile up on his site. He says he’s met a couple of interesting people, but nothing has panned out. So if you know anyone who might be interested in an older gentleman who likes crossword puzzles, Jeopardy, and football, you know where to send her.
