Why Facebook beats match-finding sites

Today's post is dedicated to a friend of mine, who I won't identify, but who commented to me about how over the last few months, the dating sites haven't had the quality and quantity of useful leads they used to. As I pondered this, Facebook pitched me a new application available, called היכרויות בפייסבוק, or for the rest of you "Dating on Facebook (in Hebrew)".

And though my friend says that Facebook doesn't appeal to him, I fear he shall have no choice but to join, because everyone in his demographic with any cluefulness will be on Facebook and not on those sites. Having checked out the application myself, I have composed my top 10 list of reasons why Facebook rocks and the other match-making sites are doomed.

10. It's free.

9. You can immediately identify the losers who have no friends.

8. You can tell a lot about people by who their friends are. In Israel, there is even a fair chance that you have a mutual friend, who can give you a recommendation (or not).

7. You can identify the losers who are online all the time and don't know about privacy settings.

6. Instead of reading phony answers to phony questions, you can find out what the person is actually interested in and actually doing. (Unfortunately, in my case, that tends to be sending free gifts and bakery items to my offspring.)

5. With non-losers, (that is, people who know to update their status fairly often, but not often enough to make it seem they are twittering), you can learn something about their real lives.

4. You can meet people through doing actual stuff you are interested in, just like in real life, before people spent all their time online. Now not only don't you have to go to a real live protest to oppose your least favorite government, but you don't have to go to protests to meet similarly-minded members of the opposite sex, either.

3. 195 (as of today) different applications for meeting people, from the mundane (as the one above) to the bizarre (Human Pets) to the insulting (Hot or Not), and yes, even anonymous (Loop12), although how anonymous is if your friends see you added the application?

2. Let's face it, do any of us have time to add ourselves to ANOTHER site with ANOTHER login and fill in ANOTHER set of questions only to find out that the database on this site mostly overlaps the people we were introduced to in the one we've been using unsuccessfully for the last 3 months? Facebook even has members who are too busy to spend huge chunks of their time surfing for a mate (read: the non-desperate).

1. No men over 50! For women who aren't financially independent, perhaps men nearing heart-attack susceptible age/weight are attractive, but for those of us who are financially independent, dating someone with a decade of extra experience has limited appeal.