Friday, August 26, 2011

Dating IITians


Back in 2008, a couple of IIT-M dudes created a dating site for IIT/IIM students and graduates just for a day -- the April Fools' Day.

Now, Subhra Priyadarshini, editor at the Nature India portal, points us to a niche dating / networking site called DateIITians with a crappy opening page [Sorry, no direct link].

Life imitating prank? Or, prank imitating prank?

5 Comments:

  1. Vijay said...

    Don't know if what you've posted is for is real or not, but it reminded me of another interesting take on dating services:
    http://tinyurl.com/42czzve

    February 19, 2011
    Jilted in the U.S., a Site Finds Love in India
    By HANNAH SELIGSON
    IN 2008, three young guys in Manhattan started Ignighter.com, a dating Web site focused on twentysomethings. They sought to set themselves apart by enabling members to set up group dates: One member, serving as a point person, could arrange a date — a movie, say, or a picnic in Central Park — with a group of other people and thereby take some of the awkward edge off of typical dates.

    During the company’s first year, the three founders — Kevin Owocki, now 26, Daniel Osit, 29, and Adam Sachs, 28 — hustled to get the word out, hosting parties, blitzing college campuses with fliers and doing a big push on Facebook.

    By the end of 2008, Ignighter.com had 50,000 registered users in the United States — a decent number, but not big enough to put it on the digital dating map, which is crowded with competitors.

    “People just didn’t get right away what the site was when we told them about it. They thought it was a site for orgies,” says Mr. Sachs, who is in charge of business development and media relations for the site.

    Then, in April 2009, while checking statistics about visitors to the site, Mr. Osit, who is in charge of marketing, noticed that there was a lot of traffic from Singapore, Malaysia, India and South Korea.

    Mr. Sachs recalls: “We didn’t pay any attention to it at first. “We thought, ‘That’s interesting — now let’s plan our next event in New York City.’ ”

    But by June, they couldn’t ignore the traffic from Asia — specifically India, which by then had more visitors than any other Asian country. Ignighter was gaining hundreds of users a day, mainly from New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai.

    “In January 2010, we made the decision that we are an Indian dating site,” Mr. Sachs says. And now, with almost two million users — and 7,000 more signing up daily — Ignighter is considered India’s fastest-growing dating Web site.

  2. Abi said...

    @Vijay: Thanks for that link! I wonder if that site continues to be as popular now as it was when NYTimes covered it ...

  3. Dilip D'Souza said...

    Those couples on the dateiians.com pages? Which IIT are they studying at?

  4. Ungrateful Alive said...

    And here I was thinking about carbon dating.

  5. Layak Singh said...

    DateIITians.com is the new unique social dating website. As I observe this site is under development and I hope for when this website will be launch.