I set up a profile on okcupid.com, which is basically just a copy of my chemistry.com profile, which I more or less lifted from my Facebook profile, which I tweaked from the MySpace profile back when it looked like that would take off, so now I don't see how there can't be anyone in the world who doesn't know all about the way I like the Tempur-Pedic mattress (I call it "that Swedish space-foam bed at Brookstone") and my dislike for movies with the main character's name in the title. Within a few minutes, two people — women — checked me, or at least my pith, out. That was one of the complaints I had with chemistry.com, that I had no real indication of how successful my blurb was, or wasn't.

okcupid is a bit more facetious than chemistry.com or eHarmony, without any long, researched psych surveys to fill out or complicated connecting procedures. There are Cosmo-style romance tests, mostly written by the okcupid community and ranging from the inane to the very inane to the prurient and inane. And there are multiple-choice matching questions that live on their own, photos, short essays, all the good stuff you expect. okcupid is free — free to use, free to connect, free to communicate — and I think it's like practice poker or the fantasy stock market, where some folks are earnest and others take it ironically until they get bored.

I'm pretty proud of what I wrote, even though it's utterly useless in its content at times. (Q: I spend a lot of time thinking about... A: What does this button do? Should I press it? Will I press it? Oh man, I'm about to press it... )

Just like chemistry.com, I don't have very high hopes for this — mostly because I'll be too chicken to contact anyone. Technology hasn't gotten around that one yet.