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Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals: Consumating & flickr

filed under: Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Melissa Gira

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

“The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals” brings you this, the “So 2.0 It Hurts” Edition…

Site Name: Consumating

Ostensible Purpose: A rounded-cornered place to meet people on the Internet that doesn’t suck.

What It’s Really Used For: Masturbatory stimulation of that unnamed part of the human brain capable of composing a charmingly nervous come-on expressed in the form of a tag. That, and, you know, hella cute photo contests.

Target Demographic: See above.

Who Really Uses It: See above, but five-to-seven years younger than you thought they’d be.

Good For Meeting People? If by meeting you mean, tagging people. You can even listen to records with them while chatting in the pretty little AJAXy autorefreshing word balloons. (Mmm, records. Mmmm, AJAX.) For those a little less freaked by the concept of face-to-face socializing, there’s even user-organized Consumeetings all over the place, conveniently listed with upcoming-style conversations around who you might find there. Which brings us to…

Good For Stalking People? Consumating’s a perfect meta-stalkers’ tool. You can watch your love object’s purposely-messy haircuts evolve. You can observe the scroll of taglove from the people they’ve met in actual real life. You can get all twitterpated when they tag you back! What’s more wondersome about Consumating is how it stalks you — when you’ve been tagged, when you’ve been passed a note, when people have given you the thumbs-up (they like me!).

Bottom line: Nerd love chic — low-key, slightly awkward, and soft, rounded, and easy on the eyes in all the right places.

Site Name: flickr

Ostensible Purpose: Sharing your photos with your friends, your family, or whoever else forms your personal, yet global audience.

What It’s Really Used For: Cruising, duh. From swingers, who you can peg as pretty much any m/f couple sharing a single username to pick up hot bi-seeming women, to hipsters, identified by their jokes-within-inside-jokes use of tags (see also: Consumating) as mating dance, it’s hotter up in there than the back bathroom at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. Chances are, if you’ve hooked up there, your partner-cum-paparazzo was a Flickr user, too. Look for the evidence in a photostream near you tonight.

Target Demographic: Everyone with a camera and a dream. And you, too.

Who Really Uses It: Cameraphone obsessives liveblogging their dates, shut-in “emerging” celebs of the Interweb who have fine-tuned their pick-up routines to use the minimal amount of uploads, and yes, even aspiring lensmen and women looking to get noticed for more than their able use of a lightmeter.

Good For Meeting People? For the simple, less obvious approach, stop by the Flickr meetup likely already going on near you. Barring that, putting out there that you do put out by posting a nipple-y photo never fails. It’s not even all that scandalous — this is, after all, for self-expression — and my inner artist is a total slut.

Good For Stalking People? Oh, hell yes. Between geocaching and post-by-phone and, truly, just our own rogue documentarian desire to record everything, Flickr is a stalker’s wet dream. You can even surface on your stalkee’s radar without even having to speak, just by Favorite-ing their photos. Words of caution here: if your stalkee is an ace-Flickr user, they probably subscribe to their Comments feed, so that obscure flirt you left on a photo from two years ago? Yeah. See also: it’s all in public, people. Don’t search and tag to destroy. Who knows whose ex-wife, roommate, boss, or lover is up to the same trouble you are.

Bottom line: What’s beautiful about Flickr is that you get back what you put in. The more naked and real you are, the more likely you are to score some back, instant karma style. There’s nothing we can find to quarrel with in that sort of sweetly equitable dating economy.

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