Lovest.at - Match Making Via Your Social Networks

Lovest.at is a unique online social connection sites which aims to help you discover new love interests based on elements you have in common across a slew of other web 2.0 sites. The site is still a work in progress and plans to implement more extensive search options and features, but it’s operative. Essentially, what it purports to do is allow you to specify which other social networking sites you’re a member of (Last.fm, hi5, Digg, etc). When you sign up for an account, you’ll be able to specify your preferences to give different amounts of weight to different search options to help you find that perfect match. Each social networking site to which you belong has a different, site-specific set of criterion which you can devote a varying amount of “points” to based on how important you feel it is that your potential partner and you have this item in common. For example, you might assign 5 points on MySpace for “music” in common, and perhaps less so for “hometown”. When you’re done, you can see how well different users who turn up in your search results match up with your preferences. Clicking on a user will show you which points you have in common so you can get a better understanding of your compatibility. Beyond this, the site isn’t really complete, so stay tuned to see what other features Lovest.at will offer in the future.

“Lovest.at is about social discovery, helping find people just like you. You can use the default 'similar people' list or create your own lists, setting parameters and relative importance of the points that matter most to you. Lovest.at draws on all your existing social site profiles so there is no need to enter much additional information”

If and when Lovest.at provides a cleaner interface and a more thorough explanation of its service, it could be a useful alternative to other online dating sites. It’s interesting take on what it means to be “compatible” might appeal to some singles who are disheartened by traditional dating sites which don’t necessarily match people up by their own specifications.

Lovest.at has a long way to go in terms of functionality and tools; it’s not exactly clear how the points system works. What happens if a user doesn’t have a certain social network? It seems unrealistic to automatically exclude them from a search simply because they don’t use, say, hi5. I also question Lovest.at’s definition of compatibility; what happened to opposites attract? Who’s to say that simply because you like the same music, you’ll fall in love?