Last week I volunteered at the Nike Womens marathon. I spent roughly 6 hours being one part of a two-man team answering questions at the Info tent. One sad question that I kept getting asked in one way or another was, “Where is my sister?” or “How do I find my mom? She just finished.” Nowadays, most big races set up family/friends meeting areas that are broken down via the alphabet.
If you are running a race (or have a family member or friend running a race), make sure to decide beforehand EXACTLY where to meet. ALSO, I know some people have issues with putting their phones in their bag that they check in the morning but, IMHO, it really is a good idea to have your phone when you finish in case the text alerts that are supposed to track an athlete aren’t working. Unfortunately, this is what happened at both the Chicago marathon and Nike Womens marathon this year.
Sadly, out of all those questions, none of them were “Hello Mr. Info man, what’s your number?”…at which point I could have replied, “Sub 3 ”

After 2 years of my Match.com profile being set on ‘invisible’ I decided to take a look at it and make some updates. I got interested in different dating sites due to various iphone apps for meeting people. My intentions weren’t/aren’t to meet the one but more to check out the UI’s and different functions available within the iphone apps. While I’m open to online dating, I’ve found that there’s a couple of barriers for me that hinder meeting someone. First reason I’m not completely sold on online dating is that I’m still being introduced to ladies through friends and social groups who know me quite well. Secondly, I don’t like the business models.

I guess part of it is that I’m still quite happy meeting people through friends which makes me lazy when it comes to putting in real time and effort into meeting a woman via the internet. That being said, I do enjoy checking out the match.com iphone app and who knows, maybe I’ll meet somebody. There really are a ton of people using it. Now comes the business model issue that I referred to: I’m what I consider a “casual online dating site checker” I look at who’s viewed me, winked… every once in a while but I still am very much meeting people through other avenues. So I’m not willing to pay a monthly subscription to communicate with somebody or see who’s emailed me… thus far, the emails have been from people who don’t have profile pics up and yes, that’s a deal-breaker for me. I would be more interested in Match.com if they started offering a micro-transaction type model for those of us who every once in a while want to email/ wink… then we could be charged per wink or per email. How about charging me a dollar for every email and $.25 per wink? That would definitely make people think longer before winking at every Joe Schmo they see. And if you’re wondering if this type of model is profitable, I’d say it is. Just look at the revenues that gaming/virtual worlds are pulling in via micro-transaction models.

I chose Match.com as an example because I haven’t bothered using any other sites and with dating sites, there needs to be a large pool of people using the site and they seem to be the biggest.

*Disclaimer: I don’t work for any dating sites. I’m actually happily single and blessed/humbled to have wonderful friends who feel I’m a good enough guy to introduce to their other friends

**Just a note: This isn’t going to become a blog about dating as I don’t write about my personal relationships. My Facebook status will not be showing single, complicate, dating… nor will ever unless I start dating Jessica Alba.