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.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to get involved in your friends’ social lives. Here’s why:

Social dating is a new name for an age-old practice: friends helping friends connect.

That means anyone can hand-pick people for their friends to date — and then watch what happens when they meet!

When you play wingwoman or wingman for your pals you can help them break the ice, offer dating advice, share their excitement when they meet someone new, and gab together about all the possibilities.

Whether you’re involved and you want to give your single friends a nudge to meet new people and see what happens — or you’re single and want a low-pressure, fun way to connect to new people — we think social dating makes finding a relationship fun, real, and like no other online experience.

When you Play Matchmaker^TM you get to connect your friends to people who are worthy of their attention. Plus — let’s be honest — it’s fun to see who your friends are thinking about dating.

Picture yourself at a party. You see a guy or gal across the room. S/he has a quirky grin that makes you think, “Perfect for my best friend M____.”

What’s your next step? Start chatting. Suss out whether this person merits your best pal’s affection. If what you hear sounds promising, you’ll casually mention your super-amazing, brilliant BFF who just happens to be available…

Then, when your BFF happens to walk by, you’ll introduce them. You all start talking. They start laughing. And then at some point you slip away and leave those two wrapped up in engaging conversation.

What happens next is up to them. But you’ll definitely be hearing about it. We get goosebumps just thinking about the possibilities!

Engage’s “Play Matchmaker^TM” features work just the same as this real world scenario, only the fun is multiplied across your entire social network.

With social dating, friends connect through friends they already know.

Today’s busy single people meet new people when they least expect it - at dinner parties, professional events, and friends’ weddings. And more often than not, these chance encounters start with a casual introduction from a mutual friend.

Social dating on Engage brings this playful way of making connections to the Web, together with all of the enjoyment that comes with a friend’s advice, suggestions, good judgment, and experience — so you can have fun exploring an attraction before you move to meeting offline.

Single people multiply their chances to meet someone new.

Engage makes it easy to connect to new people who are once or twice removed from your immediate social circle. That means you’re casting a wider net, but staying within a chain of people who trust each other’s recommendations and taste.

Engage also lets you connect to completely new people that your friends deem worthy for you. You or your matchmaking pals can consult another single person’s matchmaking wingpeople to find out what you have in common. If it seems like you two would be a dynamic duo, your friends can make an introduction that you’ll both welcome!

Everyone has more fun and single people get better results.

Because social dating introductions happen through real people, singles are more likely to hear back from people they’re introduced to — so they can see where an attraction goes and get a definitive outcome, instead of waiting for an email reply that never comes. Engage members are 80% more likely to reply to an email from someone they’ve met through their community, as compared to a stranger. That means less time wasted, more people to discover, and more opportunities for fun.

Social context keep things real.

Whether you meet through friends at a dinner party, connect through an old co-worker, or rediscover each other at a reunion, meeting socially gives you a preview of what someone is really like before you spend any time with that person one-on-one. Why should meeting online be any different?

With social dating on Engage you can get someone’s back story, find out what their friends love about them, and get a full picture of who they are before you decide to introduce them to someone you know or to try to connect to them yourself! Overall it’s more fun for the people who Play Matchmaker^TM and way less pressure for the people who want to date.

So in our humble opinion, it’s all good!

Hugs and kisses,
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