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Monday, March 12, 2007

Breaking Sex Nerd News: Twitterdildonics

filed under: Do It for Science, Dating 2.0, Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

A few minutes ago, Jackson West warned the twitterverse that qdot, of the premiere teledildonics resource slashdong, would be demo’ing ‘twitterdildonics’ at the Lifehacker party at South by Southwest, like, now, in Austin.

Just in: vibrating pants are go, and now says Scott Beale,

Twitterdildonics shaking things up at Lifehacker. SMS induced orgasims [sic] for all.

(Via twitter, of course.)

Videoplsthxbai.

update: a first photo (by Tim Trentham of Austin Metblogs) is in.

Also, add twitter user:td to play along. Full instructions now posted (of course, it’s open source) by qdot.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Unpersonals: We’re All Atwitter About Twitter

filed under: Dating 2.0, Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

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.

We’ve written before about Twitter, discussing its (lack of) sex-related postings. And we’re certainly not the only ones taking notice of the site: whether they’re loving it, hating it, or somewhere in between, the kids of 2.0 are all, well, twittering about Twitter.

Yet in all the back and forth about Twitter, no one’s touched on the most important issue: is Twitter an Unpersonal?

Any confusion about Twitter is understandable: as simple as the site’s concept is (text Twitter, Twitter texts your friends), we’re still dealing with the fact that it’s a brand, spanking new medium that we’re working out the kinks of. Sure, there have been web2txt sites before (hi, Dodgeball!), but none quite so free form, so broad, as Twitter.

What, exactly, is Twitter? It’s kinda like LiveJournal in 140 characters or less. It lets you post whatever you want, as often as you want. But Twitter’s more aggressive, more invasive, more adamantly public, than LiveJournal: rather than simply posting to the Internet and waiting for traffic, tweets hurl their way towards subscribers’ cellphones, finding an audience far beyond the reaches of the Internet.

So maybe Twitter is like Dodgeball, except Dodgeball doesn’t allow such a free flow of information. Dodgeball controls its broadcasts, only texting users information about where their friends are (as opposed to their friend’s innermost thoughts, feelings, or information about future plans).

So Twitter is a free form platform for broadcasting (a very condensed version of) whatever you want to say to the web, as well as the desktops and pockets of any interested parties.

But is it an Unpersonal?

Meeting people through Twitter is tricky. Unlike most other Unpersonals, there’s a cost (and not just a social one) to adding the wrong person as a friend. Friending an overactive Twitterphile may result in waking up to a phone overloaded with texts (a shock that can be unpleasantly repeated mid-month, upon the receipt of your phone bill) — so it’s understandable why some might be cautious about who they let into their network of tweets.

But let’s say you do manage to penetrate the Twitter network of someone you don’t know, or only sort of know: can Twitter facilitate your passive-aggressive courtship?

Here’s where the LiveJournal/Dodgeball mashup analogy comes in handy: because in spite of its bright and shiny swagger, in spite of how different and new it is, Twitter’s ultimately just those same old social networking tools remixed and wrapped up in new packaging. Twitter provides you with a feeling of connection, of closeness, to someone you don’t really know — and it allows you to build that connection while avoiding the awkwardness of admitting that you’re really just trying to get laid (or rather, “meet that special someone”). There’s something very personal about receiving someone’s tweets: and, in the right circumstances, it’s possibility to use that to bridge to something larger, something IRL.

We’re still figuring out Twitter: still exploring its possibilities, its limits, and (perhaps) its internal etiquette. We don’t quite know how to use it, yet, but we’re learning: and the more we learn, the better able Twitter will be to facilitate our hook ups, make outs, and get togethers.

Oh, and p.s.? Because Twitter archives all of a user’s tweets on their (very public) user page, and because you can receive someone’s tweets even if they haven’t listed you back as a friend, um, yeah: Twitter is super good for stalking people. I’m just sayin’.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Finding the Online Iraqi Dating Scene

filed under: Dating 2.0 by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Via boingboing, we get a story from the LA Times on the rise of online dating in Iraq. I love this graceful pointing to the sorts of intimacy the net can stimulate…

Reem, a striking 28-year-old with long dark hair, heavy makeup and lots of gold jewelry, used to meet regularly with a tight-knit group of college girlfriends. They would picnic in the park, go shopping and gossip at one another’s homes.

She hasn’t seen some of them for two years now. Many have fled the country. Those who remain venture outdoors only when they must.

Depressed and with too much time on her hands, Reem started posting love poems on an Internet forum for young Iraqis. Soon she was getting inquiries from lonely young men, with whom she chats about current events and vacations outside Iraq.

A civil servant who was afraid to give her last name, Reem isn’t interested in meeting any of them, but she enjoys the unfettered conversations that are possible only online.

“It’s very interesting to get to know a man away from the constraints of culture and tradition,” she says. “They console me and tell me there will be a day when this mess will end.”

… that applies, of course, outside the war zone. But how culturally-specific must a personal site be to best address its potential user base? And is there a place for a global online dating scene built on storytelling, wit, and a small bit of comfort in the storm? (And as to Baghdad’s Unpersonals: I’m reluctant to link anything, but for a tease of a screenshot that the usual suspects will surely recognize.)

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Chronicle, All Up In Our Emerging Tech Business

filed under: Sex Hacks, Dating 2.0, We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

There’s few things I can thank the San Francisco Chronicle for when it comes to increasing the value of the luxe side of my love life. The same could be said for O’Reilly Publishing, copyright-holder apparent to such things 2.0 — just no Sex Hacks there, and not too likely to extend Sexerati a Foo Camp invite any time soon (we’ll just never know what the smart kids do with their Segways come nightfall).

So it was like a love parade, a love commotion, a love-is-no-longer-a-battlefield this morning seeing the Chron’s front page, pointing to a pleasant, possible mashup of the mushiest kind:

Well, then — what do we heart most about Love 2.0 hitting the nigh-mainstream?

Aside from our ongoing coverage of the same since our inception?

Or that, before my morning coffee even had me ambling past a yellow newspaper box (like Bloglines, but it costs a quarter and there’s no del.icio.us links built-in), I had already seen Nick Douglas’s Twitter mock-protest about the Chron’s limp love-rage?

(And, oh! for the days when saying ‘the Chronicle‘ only set my heart a-flutter if it was likely a nod to some juicy thing on teacher/student relations in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and not my now-hometown rag.)

Or maybe it was that I could find an image of a newspaper box with the paper in question (thanks, bovinity!) — even though there’s one right behind me as I write this, I left my camera at my apartment — on Flickr in the number one search result for “Love 2.0″ ?

No, it’s just that we can so immediately, wirelessly, relatively anonymously wish you all the best, bluest, diagonally-lined, user-generated love, ever. Here’s hoping you keep yourself compliant and that your content doesn’t get scraped up too much in the process.

If it does?

Love comes calling with rounded corners today.

Maybe it all won’t hurt so much, now that it’s the future.