Engage has been busy this week with the exciting Web 2.0 conference in SF! After a fantastic turnout on Monday night for Love 2.0, we were out last night sharing T-shirt love to all the conference attendees hopping in the South Park Crawl. We handed out Engage t-shirts to folks as they were hopping in between ZoomProspector @ Gallery 16, IBM @ Jack Falstaff, Leverage Software, Federated Media Publishing @ Nova, Yahoo! Brickhouse, Adaptive Path, ESVCA @ Andrea Schwartz Gallery. We had a blast connecting with everyone and the shirts seemed to be a hit. Not one left!

What are you up to Monday night? Meet up with Engage!

Love 2.0 - Socializing the Dating Experience at Web 2.0 Expo 2008

Who: Fabulous Singles and Their Friends Who Love Them

What: A Monday night kick-off event and videos throughout the week at Web2.0 Expo 2008

Where: Harlot, 46 Minna St., San Francisco, http://www.harlotsf.com/

When:  Starts at Harlot on Monday night, April 21^st at 8 pm

When: That’s Monday - yeah - in like 3 days.  If you’re single, involved but love your single friends, or interested in meeting the coolest people in tech, you’ll make the time!

Why: Because we believe in Love and Technology!

PLUS - Don’t miss The TechSet interviews of the best and brightest SINGLES in social media sponsored by Engage throughout week during Web2.0 Expo - including Pete Cashmore, Stephanie Agresta, Tara Hunt, Willo O’Brien, Audbrey Sabala

April 10th was the night of our big debut at the “Geek Goes Chic” party we co-hosted with TechCrunch and PopSugar, at the Vanguard in Hollywood. But we weren’t just there to be social butterflies, dear readers!

We were on a mission to introduce the world to the new Engage. Plus, we hoped to help some genial geeks connect with the chic social mavens of their dreams. And vice-versa. (Turns out hotties dream about geeks as great relationship material. Our recent Romancing the Geek survey showed that 82% of women and 72% of men were into geeks — and would even choose silicon valley entrepreneurs over hollywood stars as potential mates!)

Whether you considered yourself a Geek, part of the Chic, or just aren’t into labels, there was something for everyone at this gathering. And Engage staffers were on the loose to Play Matchmaker™ with members of the crowd, bringing people together in the real world the way we do online. 

Here’s a clip of TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington interviewing our very own VP of Love Trish McDermott and our CEO Suneet Wadhwa. Don’t they look glam in white?

You can also check out our flickr stream for photos from the event. See if you can spot the Engage staffers as they demo Engage and fix up people in the crowd.

April 10th is our big night out! We’ll be at the Vanguard in Hollywood for “Geek Goes Chic,” a party we’re throwing with the technology bloggers at TechCrunch and the celebrity gossip mavens at PopSugar.

We’ll be showing off the brand new Engage service that we unveiled this week. Have you tried it?

Plus, Alex Michel, the first bachelor from ABC’s “The Bachelor,” and our very own VP of Love, Trish McDermott, will be on hand to help connect the Geeks to the Chic at the event.

Our recent “Romancing the Geek” survey shows that Geeks might inherit the Earth after all, at least in the romantic department. Our survey showed that 82% of people are open to dating a “Geek”, and 72% said they’d be happier in a marriage with a famous Silicon Valley geek than a Hollywood celebrity. Great news for you smart and technology-savvy types!

We’ll share pictures and more party news soon!

Hugs and kisses,

Engage

We’re getting attention for the new version of Engage that we unveiled yesterday.

Kristen Nicole on Mashable noticed:

“Engage is one of those sites seeking better recommendation tools for hooking you up in a genuine, non-contrived manner…”

Thanks Kristen! Read her complete article about our new site and our fun approach to social dating.

You can also check our press release about the launch.

Updated: Read what the Silicon Valley/San Jose BusinessJournal said about us today.

Another update: We also made the Silicon Valley Wire. Read it here.

Our engineering team did all their abracadabra stuff and we’re back up with a brand new version of our service. Sign in now to try all the new social dating goodness.

Here’s a peek at what we’ve added and improved:

• Fresh Faces - These are prospects for you (if you’re single) and/or your single friends (if you’re playing matchmaker for others). Click ‘em, consider ‘em, keep them in your suggestions list, tell friends about them, or decide they’re not right and move on. It’s verrrrry addictive to click through all the faces.

• Suggested for you… Shows you people that your friends want you to meet.

• Suggestions for friends… Shows you who your single friends are considering. Do they seem worthy of your friends’ attention? You get to add the human intuition ingredient and decide whether people are worth pointing out.

• Voting - Everyone likes to get a second opinion about possible matches before they make a move. Now you get to vote on suggested matches for your friends to help them decide what to do next.

• Social Feed - In keeping with our extra-social theme, we’ve added a personal news ticker that tells you what your friends are up to on Engage. You can use it to inform your friends about your activities. Just answer “What are you up to?” to write a personalized news feed message.

• Social Feed email - To help you catch up with your pals, you’ll get a daily summary of all the stuff your friends have been up to. Who made suggestions? Who got introduced? Who voted Yes on suggestions you made? Keep your eyes peeled for this email to find out.

• Social Points - We love to play, so we’ve made Engage even more like a game. Social Points reward you for doing things that make the community more fun for everyone. If you’re already a member of Engage, you already have some points. Sign in to check out your score!

You’ll also notice fewer tabs and more ways to connect with friends sprinkled all over the site.

So go have fun with it and get social! Let us know how it goes.

Hugs and kisses,

Engage

That means the site’s going to be down for a bit while we unfurl a spiffy new version. We plan to be away until 8:30pm or so. (We’ll update you if that changes.)

Sorry to make you wait — but it’s going to be totally worth it when you see our new ways to get social, Play Matchmaker^TM, connect with friends, and meet new people.

See you later tonight? It’s a date!

Hi friends!

Engage made the news today. (Don’t mind if we toot our own horn.) We were featured on Fox’s Morning Show with Mike and Juliet.

M & J ran a great segment that showed how much fun everyone can have when friends and family play matchmaker for each other. The show did a great job showing how friendly matchmakers can weed out fakes and phonies — and make it more fun to connect to new people when you’re single. Well, we knew that. But we love it when others catch on!

Did you see Engage on TV this morning? What did you think?

xo,

Engage

Do you agree? Take our “Romancing the Geek” survey. Then read on…

Not a lot has changed in mate selection in the last forty thousand years. In the good old days of dating, accomplished hunters were hot prospects in the eyes of many a cave girl. Strength, speed and agility would have been attributes all Paleolithic women checked as desirable in a mate on their online dating profile. Those traits were necessary for Neanderthal bachelors to slay a mammoth or two and assure a future family’s survival.

While some dating desires have evolved over the years, women today are still attracted to hunter-providers. It’s in our DNA. Even as we’ve become fully capable of slaying our own modern-day mammoths, we continue to seek affluent, tall, well educated, and professionally successful romantic partners because they can bring home the goods we’re hard-wired to need for happily-ever-after.

Are geeks the new hunter heroes?

If forty really is the new thirty and pink is the new black, then geeks may be the new hot, hunky mammoth hunters of single women’s dreams. Geeks tend to be well educated, hard working, successful, and often are involved in startups that may provide a better world for all of us.

Who brought us the clean-tech movement? Scientist geeks. Who reconnected us to online communities that help us thrive? Internet geeks.

Geeks aren’t necessarily tall. Many hunch over a laptop all day or generally keep their head down to avoid eye contact. Maybe if we uncurled them we’d find that geeks are actually taller than their less tech-savvy counterparts — a pleasantly sexy surprise. But even slumped over, many geeks are hot dating prospects today.

Geek Goes Chic

Engage goes to Hollywood on April 10th for the TechCrunch and PopSugar “Geek Goes Chic” party. We’ll demo new site features and play matchmaker for TechCrunch geeks and PopSugar style mavens hoping to get their romantic groove on. Whether you’re a geek yourself, or might date a geek someday, please take the Engage “Romancing the Geek” survey. We want you to weigh in on how hot, hunky, and romantic geeks really are.

If you’re a geek hoping to meet the woman of your dreams with us in Hollywood, or out there in the big world of dating, check out this DailyIdea video for a few tips on meeting girls.

See you in Hollywood!

Trish McDermott
VP of Love, Engage

Valentine’s week is always a lot of fun, and occasionally full of surprises, when you work for a social dating site. Here’s a recap of the last few days at Engage.

We Rode the Love Train

I suppose we could have been in the office working on Valentine’s morning, but where is the love in that? Instead, we took a team of Engage staff and friends, grabbed a musician armed with a few hundred love songs and headed down to the Montgomery BART station to romance some unsuspecting commuters.

We gave away just under 3,000 roses in 90 minutes and shared a little love with a lot of San Franciscans. One of them was the rather handsome Michael Singer, from InformationWeek, who was apparently feeling so much love for us that he went right to the office and posted about his Engage Love Train encounter. Of course, not everyone was feeling all warm and fuzzy about the love train, especially not Andy Wright in his post at SFWeekly.com going to throw a lot of love his way this year, and we’ll see if he comes around for next February 14th.

Just about everyone in the BART station was smiling, and a few commuters were even singing along to their favorite love song. Watch the CBS news video and feel the love for yourself.

Engage Research Made the News

Valentine’s week is always a busy press time around here. Jen Saranow at the Wall Street Journal worked with us for her “The Cut-and-Paste Personality,” piece about singles plagiarizing each other’s dating profiles. Jennifer says that a recent search at that other dating site that I helped start and run for ten years:

…brought up more than 90 profiles with such lines as: “I want an opposite. A yin to my yang,” or “You know that woman who is the first person on the dance floor at every party? That’s me.” They weren’t even from real people. They were cribbed from sample profiles posted online at E-Cyrano.com (www.e-cyrano.com) by dating coach and profile writer Evan Marc Katz. “It just seems so short-sighted,” says Mr. Katz, of Los Angeles. “Everybody steals the same lines so they are not original anymore.”

Jennifer included this Engage research in her piece:

In a recent survey of more than 400 online daters commissioned by Engage.com, 9% of respondents said they copied from another person’s profile; 15% suspect their own words were stolen.

Isn’t stealing someone else’s profile text scraping the bottom of the barrel for insight into who we are, why someone might be attracted to us, and what we’re looking for in a partner? Apparently not everyone thinks so. Meanwhile, over at the Chicago Tribune, technology writer Wailin Wong looked at the growing confusion regarding how we should use technology and social networks in our romantic lives:

In simpler times, a high school ring was all it took to signal the start of a relationship. And when the breakup came, who would know or care if one tucked away a few mementos?

All that has changed in the digital era, in which millions of people chronicle the real-time, intimate details of their lives on social networking Web sites like Facebook.com. Dating may be no more or less complex than ever, but because gossip about who’s got a new boyfriend or girlfriend — and who just lost one — now travels instantaneously to a large network of contacts, a new relationship minefield has emerged.

Wailin used some new Engage research in her story “What’s Your Status? Relationships Revealed Online.”

McDermott’s advice is to remember that relationships involve people, not machines. Strange as that sounds, Engage.com conducted a survey of more than 600 single adults in the U.S. and found 21 percent said it was OK to say “I love you” for the first time in an e-mail or text message. Only 12 percent said it was acceptable to break up electronically.

Valentine’s Surprises

Over at About.com’s Weird News Buck Wolf reported that:

In Kansas, a woman carrying flowers and a box of candy walked into a bank and told the teller that the box contained a bomb. She demanded an undisclosed sum, and after she left, x-rays shows the chocolates contained nothing more dangerous than nougat.

Buck also mentioned that 8 million Americans probably sent themselves Valentine’s presents this year. If we had known, we would have given them a rose!

Hugs, kisses and warm romantic wishes this love week from all of us…
Trish McDermott
VP of Love, Engage