Valentine’s Day is just around the corner–and if you’re without a special someone, online dating might sound like a viable option.
Armed with nothing but our shining personalities and sexy photos, the PCWorld team took a look at some of the Web’s best (and geekiest) dating Websites. In order to test them, hot or not we created a female profile (Sarah) and a male one (Alex), and sent out some messages to see what would come back to us. Here’s what we found.
Geek2Geek
Geek 2 Geek: Click for full-size image. Geek 2 Geek calls itself “the best place on the net to meet geeks.” It boasts over 200,000 members, growing by about 6000 members each month. Its three levels of membership–free, “silver,” and “gold”–allows different levels of communication. While a free membership lets you browse unlimited profiles and receive unlimited messages, you can’t send any out (except to paid gold members) until you upgrade to a silver account.
Geek 2 Geek does have a matchmaking service. Signing up is quick and easy, and you don’t have to answer all of the questions right away (though you certainly can). A picture is also not a profile requirement. Matchmaking questions include everything from “type of sense of humor” to “areas of interest,” and similar geeks are delivered to your “My Matches” inbox.
As for whether you’ll actually find geeks on this site, well, a quick look-through says yes. It helps, of course, that the “areas of interest” are all geek-oriented, and include options like “online gaming,” “Star Trek,” “Tolkien,” and “Monty Python.” The site itself is decently easy to navigate, though it’s rather busy-looking (it looks a lot like a Web hosting site that’s trying to sell you something) and not as conducive to browsing as some of the other sites we reviewed.
Sarah’s take: This site isn’t really limited to geeks–it looks like just about everyone is on here. That makes me think a lot of the profiles are probably outdated and/or not being used. Plus, it takes way too much information to complete your profile.
Alex’s take: Yeah, “geek” in this case seems synonymous with “anyone who owns a computer.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and neither is the surplus of seduction toys like video, quizzes, and live chat; just know that Geek 2 Geek is a full-on social network, not just a dating service.
OtakuBooty
OtakuBooty: Click for full-size image. OtakuBooty is part online dating and part social networking. The name comes from a Japanese slang term for “nerd” (okay, it’s more of a derogatory term), and focuses on a less traditional type of geek–the anime/manga/Japan-fan type.
Signing up is free, and you can receive unlimited free messages–you just can’t see who sent them until you sign up for a paid membership. Luckily, paid membership is only $4 per month or $15 per year, and allows you full access to the site.
OtakuBooty keeps the nerd factor alive throughout the site: On the initial sign-up page, required fields are marked with an invincibility star; on the payment page there’s a bogus “send ham” option for a “recurring ham subscription.”
Unfortunately, this epic nerdiness carries over to the site’s layout. OtakuBooty is sort of like the Android OS–a little too rough around the edges. The good news is that this will probably scare off the ungeeky types who are unwilling to deal with anything less than a perfect user interface. The bad news is that there are just so many tabs. The site looks a lot like a bad wiki–and hey, there’s even a site wiki.
