Different sites take different approaches. Lavalife (www.lavalife.com) mainly caters to younger, tech-savvy people looking to date. SeniorFriendFinder (www.seniorfriendfinder.com) is aimed at older people looking for love and companionship. There are even sites that target people with special interests like owning horses or listening to Goth music (www.equestriancupid.com and www.gothicmatch.com , to be precise).

Dating sites catering to people seeking marriage often refer to themselves as “online relationship sites.” They attempt to approach the compatibility problem as scientifically as possible. For example, you fill out a lengthy personality profile and pay a fee ($21 to $60 a month, depending on how many months you sign up for in advance). At www.eharmony.com , for instance, you answer 436 questions about all aspects of your personality, including sense of humor, intellect, and spiritual beliefs. The company’s computers then attempt to match you up with somebody with a similar profile.

Speaking of spiritual beliefs: many sites are designed for those who want to date within their faith. Some of these include JDate (a site for Jewish singles at www.jdate.com); BigChurch (for Christian singles; www.bigchurch.com); and the Muslim Marriage Junction (www.muslimmarriagejunction.com). Other sites help people with similar ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, or interests (like pets) meet each other—the dating portal site TruDating has loads of links to these specialized matchmaking sites at www.trudating.com.

You’ve probably heard horror stories in the news about dates gone horribly, horribly wrong in one way or another. Like anything you do online, you need to use caution and common sense in your online dealings, and dating is no exception. For example:

Needless to say, never do anything that makes you uncomfortable, no matter what the other person wants.

There’s nothing wrong with a quick Web search on someone you’re interested in, either. Sites like SafeDate (www.safedate.com) and True (www.true.com ) even go as far as running criminal-and matrimonial- background checks on potential dates.

If you’re new to the whole online dating scene and don’t have any dead-set expectations about who you’re looking for, Friendster and Match.com, described in the following sections, may be good places to begin your quest.

With millions of members and the ability to find old classmates, co-workers, and that guy you used to skydive with, Friendster (www.friendster.com) fuses social networking with online dating. People in the real world meet other people through friends, and friends of friends. Friendster recreates social circles online by letting you create a profile page and then tag those folks who you’ve anointed as friends. Links to the profiles of all your friends appear on your profile page, making it easy to see who knows whom and where those social circles intersect.

You can tag people as friends in three different ways:

When you sign up for Friendster (which is free but slathered with advertisements), you’re invited to import your Yahoo Mail or Hotmail email address book and invite all your buddies to be your Friendster friends. As you work through your profile setup, you’re prompted to upload a personal photo and fill out a form detailing your hometown, educational background, job, hobbies, and favorite books, movies, music, and TV shows. You also get a freeform box to describe yourself in 2,000 characters or less. Once you get your profile page rolling, you can add your own blog to it, post up to 50 personal photos, or share video clips with your pals.

You also get your own email inbox on the site, as shown in Figure 17-1, which you can use to send notes to other Friendsters. (This is a safer way to meet new people than passing out your email address to online strangers.) You can search profiles by name, location, college, or favorite TV shows.

Figure 17-1. A Friendster account sets you up with your own wellsponsored mailbox. (Since it’s free, be prepared to see lots of ads.) Click the Bulletin Board link to post messages (like group invitations) that you want all your Friendster pals to see.

When you click the My Settings link at the top of any Friendster page, you can choose who has permission to see your full profile—friends, friends of friends, or anybody on Friendster. People who aren’t on your approved list see only a very minimal profile, with just your first name, age, gender, location, and hometown listed.

The horizontal orange toolbar across the top of the Friendster page holds links to other corners of the site. Under Radio, for example, there’s a streaming music service (powered by Pandora; Section 11.4.3) where you can create personalized radio stations to share your taste in music with your Friendster pals.

And taking a cue from Craigslist (Section 7.2.3), Friendster has a classifieds section where people can post details about anything from an open job to an open house. In the toolbar, click More and then Classifieds to see them.

Match.com (www.match.com) has been around since 1995 and has more than eight million members; no wonder it claims to be the biggest online personals site.

Match.com doesn’t waste any time getting you on the road to love: a form to create a Match.com account sits smack-dab in the middle of its home page (shown in Figure 17-2). Once you fill in a few essentials like your gender, location, age, and the gender and age range of the person you’d like to meet, click Find My Matches to see a few randomly selected people who match your criteria. To find really compatible people, though, you need to fill out an in-depth Match.com profile by clicking the My Profile link at the top of the page. You set up your profile by answering a multipage questionnaire, which includes questions like “How tall are you?” and “What’s your sign?” Answer, “I don’t believe in astrology” if you don’t roll with the zodiac crowd.

Figure 17-2. Match.com doesn’t waste any time booking you on the Love Train. The sign-up box on the home page, shown here, gathers basic information; you fill out a much more in-depth profile a few steps later.

Posting a photo is optional, but consider this bit of dating research: Match.com says that men are 15 times more likely to look at a profile that includes a photo; women are 8.5 times more likely to look if there’s a photo. (Insert your own wisecrack about gender-based approaches to dating here.)

After your profile is complete, you submit the whole thing to Match.com for approval. The site’s customer service team checks it over (within 48 hours) to make sure you’re not an ax murderer. Then your profile is available to people who are searching the site for someone like you.

The Search button at the top of any Match.com page lets you search for people with similar interests, or based on self-described physical characteristics, location, lifestyle, age, and so on.

All the above activities are free. Once you find someone on the site you want to meet, however, contacting her requires getting out your credit card and subscribing. Prices for these plans are awfully hard to locate on the site, but currently go as follows: $30 for one month, $51 for three months, or $78 for six months. With your subscription in hand, you have your backstage pass to wander around and send messages or flirty little " winks” (instant message type notes that express an interest in someone) to other members.

Figure 17-3. MySpace has become an online hangout for millions of people, most of them teens and young adults, who all post their profiles, photos, and other personal details in order to make new friends. Emerging bands, artists, and filmmakers also use MySpace as a place to announce their projects, like the music festival shown here that includes MP3 song samples.

You can also sign up to have Match.com send you email messages featuring the profiles of people it thinks you’d match up with. Just click the Account Settings link at the top of the page and click the Match By Mail option. If you’re frequently on the road, there’s even a version of the site for cellphones at http://mobile.match.com.

This site (www.linkedin.com) has more than five million registered users who work in 130 industries. Using LinkedIn is not unlike using an online dating site, except your profile lists your professional accomplishments and work history instead of your hair color and preference for chocolate chip ice cream.

Joining LinkedIn is free, but you can upgrade your account to a paid version that offers more features (described below). During the initial sign-up process, the site asks you about your current job (if you have one) and where you went to college. After you complete your registration, LinkedIn scans its database for other members who work at the same company or went to the same school during the years you attended, giving you an instant set of potential contacts, or connections, to use LinkedIn’s lingo.

If someone already in LinkedIn sent you an invitation to join the site (Figure 17-4), you come in as a “trusted friend” and are connected to that person and become part of his or her network. Once you’re connected to other people, you can see their list of personal connections on their profile pages. When someone that you and another LinkedIn member know appears on both your profile pages, that mutual friend is listed as a shared connection. From the InMail and Introductions link on your home page, you can receive and forward introductions from other LinkedIn members.

Figure 17-4. You don’t have to go to conferences or office parties to network anymore. Sites like LinkedIn encourage its members to invite their professional contacts to the site and form their own overlapping online networks.

Even without joining the site, you can use the search box on the site’s front page to look people up by name. Once you sign up with the site, you can see more details about people, including—if they’ve mentioned it in their profiles—whether they’re looking for a new job. When you look at someone’s LinkedIn profile, you can see the person’s entire educational and professional history as they’ve listed it. If you’ve worked with the person, there’s an Endorse link under each job entry that lets you write a public note about the experience.

Click the Services tab at the top of the LinkedIn site to get to a directory page—which can help if you’re looking to hire, say, a corporate litigator or a branding consultant. Just click away until you find someone in the desired field who comes highly recommended. Clicking the People tab at the top of the page lets you search for folks by name and profession.

The free version of LinkedIn gives you plenty of electronic schmoozing tools, but the site also offers paid accounts that pile on extra features like the ability to make multiple introductions at one time, get technical support, and use a messaging system that keeps your email address private. Prices start at $60 a year for the Personal Plus account and go up to $2,000 for Pro accounts (designed for recruiters and other power users who need to communicate with large numbers of people each month). Click the Customer Service/FAQ link at the bottom of the LinkedIn page to get a full rundown of pricing plans and features.

Combining the powers of a job-search site with the insider friendliness of a professional networking service, Jobster (www.jobster.com) lets you create a profile to highlight your talents to companies you’d really like to work for. American Express, Bose Electronics, and Bayer Healthcare—along with several marketing, insurance, and public relations firms—are among the companies that consult Jobster to find potential hires.

The whole thing’s free and you don’t have to create a profile to use the site (you can just search for openings, if you like), but a profile does give you a place to post your professional experience and education for those who may be looking.

Jobster regularly scans traditional job-listing Web sites (Section 4.3) for fresh postings; you can sign up for email alerts to hear about these new positions. The site has two types of email alerts: Regular Job Alert messages give you the heads-up when a job that matches your stated interests is posted, and Insider Alerts. To get Insider Alerts, you have to be referred by an employee of a firm that already uses Jobster. But once you get that referral in your profile, you can ask those companies to contact you when other desired positions open up. In competitive fields, every little bit of inside information helps, and it sure beats scanning the tiny type in the classified job listings.