dating

Wanted: A single Facebook millionaire

I was talking with a former colleague a few months ago, explaining how unsure I felt about everything since my move to San Francisco -- from where to drop off my dry cleaning to navigating the dating scene. Both make me queasy.

"Oh, but you're in the best spot," my source crooned. "Think about all the companies that are going to IPO soon. You just have to know where to be. " Go find a guy. A soon-to-be rich guy.

Quelle horreurs! With my two Ivy league graduate degrees and a solid decade of working at … Read more

Hey, want to online date an inmate?

Americans like to love, but also like to incarcerate.

Indeed, despite only enjoying 5 percent of the world's human beings, the United States seems to be home to almost a quarter of all the world's prisoners.

Who could not have imagined, then, that some hardy, enterprising soul would see in this population a market gap?

Please greet, therefore, Meet-An-Inmate.com. Actually, this site claims to have been "serving inmates since 1998," yet the service had somehow passed me by until today's Daily Mail brought its full glory to my attention.

Meet-An-Inmate allows you to peruse … Read more

Adjust your file dates with File Date Changer

Anyone who works with digital images or other files that tend to get organized by date knows that sometimes things can run amok; why are last month's vacation photos showing up with images from 2001? Whether the dates have been changed by some technological error or you have some other reason to adjust the Created, Modified, and Accessed dates of a file, File Date Changer makes this task a snap.

File Date Changer does exactly what the name implies, and nothing more; if you need to edit a file's metadata, this program isn't going to do it. … Read more

The 404 1,027: Where every Friday should be this good (podcast)

Our special guest today is CNETer Zach W., but longtime 404 listeners may recognize him as the voice behind Tina Schwartz, our weekly visitor on Tuna Tuesdays. He joins us today as our ad-hoc social correspondent with a firsthand account of Grouper, a newish startup that uses Facebook to set up a group blind date between two groups of friends: three guys and three girls.

Zach takes us through the sign-up process, the criteria that he chooses for his wingmen, and the actual experience of going online to meet someone offline. If you've ever been curious about what goes on during an online date, definitely check out today's episode of The 404.… Read more

How Skout attracted millions with its flirty ways

In the quickly evolving world of apps, Skout is a virtually an old standby at this point.

Having launched in 2007 and then re-tooled to its current iteration two years later, Skout is a mobile social network built on the premise that people would want to meet and flirt with people close to them. Skout uses the phone's ability to locate itself to determine nearby people (to ensure privacy, the service doesn't provide the exact location of a person, only getting as specific as half a mile away).

The app is free, but Skout generates revenue through the … Read more

Hackers steal passwords from military dating site

Hackers broke into the database for a military dating Web site and stole passwords, e-mail addresses, and other information from nearly 171,000 accounts, according to a post on the Pastebin site this weekend:

"The website http://www.militarysingles.com/ was recently closed day ago or so, so we dumped email db," the hackers said in their post. "There are emails such as @us.army.mil ; @carney.navy.mil ; @greatlakes.cnet.navy.mil ; @microsoft.com ; etc.."

So-called "data dumps" are a common occurrence, but what makes this one notable is that the group is … Read more

The 404 1,016: Where we need a social network for our social network (podcast)

Leaked from 404 Podcast 1,016:

Thank you, Facebook: A way to demote annoying 'friends' on the sly. Want a vibrating tattoo that alerts you to a call? Nokia does. Three online dating sites agree to screen for predators. AT&T's vibrating steering wheel tells you when to turn, claims less distracting than visual cues. Miami judge says BitTorrent downloads are protected anonymous speech. Wait, nevermind. Bathroom break video : Wes Anderson's 'Made of Imagination' Sony TV commercial.

… Read more

Startups reveal social experiments at Launch

SAN FRANCISCO--Four companies at the Launch conference here today were pitching new social interaction models. It's a risky thing to do, trying to drive users to interact with each other in heavily scripted ways, but these companies are trying, mostly to good effect.

I'll start with 15Five, the strongest in this bunch. This service is a way for company employees to, once a week, quickly say what's working at their jobs, what isn't, and how they are feeling. These quick reports roll up to their manager, who can then reply to feedback items, and select some … Read more

Expect tantrums from BabyPlan

If you're serious about getting pregnant, you probably know that tracking your menstrual cycles and ovulation is a great way to increase your odds. There are plenty of ways to do this; you can do it the old-fashioned way, using a calendar, or there are any number of Web sites that can do much of the work for you. Or, if you're an Excel user, you can use a spreadsheet.

That's what BabyPlan is: an Excel workbook that helps you calculate your cycle length, predict ovulation, calculate due dates, and even predict the sex of your baby. … Read more