Yale dating website - a little somethin' on the side

April 12, 2004 11:33 PM

So Yale students have a dating website for those who are "matched, single, or looking for a little somethin' on the side." Unfortunately, the Yale College Council, which launched the site in February 2004, is being accused of stealing the HTML code from a precursor site at Wesleyan, and the Yale Student Activities Commission may have ripped off Weslyan's dating questionnaires. Happily, the Herald article confirms that while the website might be in trouble, "the courts will never shut down the most reliable dating hotspot at Yale" -- the library.
posted by onlyconnect (13 comments total)

OMG! THAT BITCH STOLE MY HTML!
posted by quonsar at 11:46 PM on April 12, 2004

haha -- quonsar should have the FPP instead
posted by Satapher at 3:40 AM on April 13, 2004

Wesmatch's take.
posted by hippugeek at 5:45 AM on April 13, 2004

man.. they didn't even try to hide their thievery.
posted by lotsofno at 6:18 AM on April 13, 2004

"WesMatch, created in April 2002 by Wesleyan students Dan Stillman and Matt Eaton, boasts an overall membership of over 5,300 students"

Yet, on their website it says 2478 Registered Users.
posted by banished at 6:54 AM on April 13, 2004

hmm... maybe overall membership is including the other incarnations of the site they set up for other schools? In which case, ignore the above comment.
posted by banished at 6:55 AM on April 13, 2004

Not exactly on topic, but...

Why do college students even need an online dating site? Isn't college the one time in your life that you don't have problems meeting new people and dating? Or is meeting people in person at parties, in class, in the dining hall, through friends, or randomly on campus horribly old fashioned? (It's been over 10 years since I've been in college, so maybe I'm just way out of touch.)
posted by MsVader at 7:59 AM on April 13, 2004

banished, the page I linked above says WesMatch "has served over 5,300 students at Wesleyan and Williams College." That may also include Wes students who have graduated, though I'd think their accounts would still be counted among "registered users."

I just emailed the creators to let them know about this thread and offered to post anything they wanted to add.
posted by hippugeek at 9:11 AM on April 13, 2004

Here's what happened MsVader... college was formerly prohibitively expensive, and although still expensive, more and more people are going to college than ever before. Back when college was more expensive, only richer families could afford to send their kids. These rich men had hot wives because they were rich, and thus produced hot college girls. Now however, hot girls are rarer because they're mixed in with the common folk, even at Big 10 universities. Thus, giant photogallery web sites had to be created to weed out the undesirables. Thank God for technology!
posted by banished at 9:12 AM on April 13, 2004

Meh, when I was at Tulane, the Engineering school had a yearly fundraiser where you'd fill out a questionaire, and on Valentine's Day, pay a buck to get the list of people you were compatible with.

So this is nothing new.
posted by Katemonkey at 12:18 PM on April 13, 2004

Thanks for the Wesmatch link, hippigeek -- that shows the site similarities much more clearly than the original links, and is also pretty funny.

I think college computer dating was sort of inevitable, because college kids can have enough geek in them to want to use the technology that's at their fingertips for something that might get them laid.
posted by onlyconnect at 1:13 PM on April 13, 2004

it was originally called wescam

to be sure, like many aspects of Wesleyan, it's really not the same anymore

did they just copy the interface? that's not really illegal, you know, but it's true: imitation is the highest form of flattery
posted by gkr at 2:00 AM on April 15, 2004

Actually, wescam is still around and (as far as I know) independent of wesmatch. It may have changed over the years, but its current incarnation is similar to those somebody-has-a-crush-on-you email scams: towards the end of the year seniors and underclassmen submit the names of people they want a last chance at before graduation, if the names match up, etc. Wesmatch operates year-round and is based on a compatibility questionare rather than professions of interested-ness. It satisfies both geekiness and nazel-gazing...

gkr, I'd be interested in hearing your perceptions of how Wes has changed, both out of pure curiousity and because it's relevant to a couple of things I'm working on. My email is posted.
posted by hippugeek at 8:35 AM on April 15, 2004