You wouldn’t think sharing files and sharing hearts have that much in common, but apparently The Pirate Bay sees fit to use its considerable strength in the former to launch into the latter. According to a TechCrunch report you can’t help but be skeptical of until you see the site with your own eyes, The Pirate Bay is teaming up with Meezoog to make an incredibly-similar-to-Meezoog dating site, PirateDate.com.
Needless to say, this required some examination from within. Geekosystem investigates:Creating an account on PirateDate is super easy. Almost instantly, I’m in a hub with links to other users. As the site’s currently in its infancy, it looked like there was only one other user signed on to the entire site when I made my account and logged in.
I got this lovely message from the team, which really works wonders to explain what exactly the site is about:
Dear Jamie,
Welcome to Pirate Date, a unique dating network where you can meet professional singles connected to friends you know and trust.
What to expect from Pirate Date:
1. Lots of REAL prospects: Pirate Date members invite their friends to join because they are then connected to all of their single friends, and then their single friends, and so on. This approach creates a huge network of non-anonymous singles, including singles from Facebook.
2. Easy Communication: You can send messages, chat live or wink at people you find interesting.
3. Knowledge & Safety: Check out the “Trust Paths” that link you to every Pirate Date member, the people who “vouch” for each other and other unique features that indicate how well you can trust the people behind the profiles.
It looks, then, like the site boils down to matchmaking your Facebook friends with each other. It really centers on this idea of “paths.” But because none of my Facebook friends are on PirateDate, I have no paths. But PirateDate will link you to people who are connected to you, basically turning the idea of “friends of friends of friends” into the more appealing idea of “dating prospects.”
This, I fear, is where the site is going to fall short. There’s no sense of compatibility tracking. You have to look hard at the profile of each person you want to investigate. Search criteria are restricted to purely pragmatic categories like age, gender, and location. There’s no simple way to find someone with common interests, just common friends. In a somewhat creepy fashion, though, it appears to search all your friends on Facebook, not just those with PirateDate accounts.
As a matchmaker site more than a conventional dating site, the feature that most epitomizes what PirateDate is about is vouchers. You can get your friends to vouch for you — basically saying you’re a good guy or gal. Then the friends of your referrers who are PirateDate members can see how nice of a guy or gal your mutual friend thinks you are, and those people will all want to date you. It’s startlingly like  how Danny flooded Jordan with letters in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
There appear to be some kinks to be worked out. When I found the profile of one of my closest female friends, with whom I am obviously friends on Facebook, the site told me that she and I had 3% social proximity. In other words, our social ties were very distant, which seems odd, seeing as I know for certain that she and I have plenty of mutual friends and are friends ourselves. Unless she just blocked me two seconds ago. She didn’t.
In other sketchiness, it asks for your e-mail and password. Not your password to PirateDate, but your e-mail password, so it can find e-mail contacts already on the site. Not unheard of, but it’s a little uncomfortable giving such sensitive info to a site with “Pirate” in the name.
So is there any reason to use PirateDate instead of another more conventional dating service? Only if you suspect that your friends’ friends’ friends are really attractive and interesting and nice. While mutual friendship is probably some indicator of compatibility, it doesn’t merit its own site. And there’s just no way that enough people are going to jump aboard PirateDate for it to ever take off. And without your friends on PirateDate, you can’t find their friends.
TechCrunch offers a pragmatic look at why The Pirate Bay would ever consider trying this out:
While a dating site seems like an odd departure for a file sharing site, it makes sense that the Pirate Bay would want to focus on other verticals considering the legal troubles the site has been involved in with sharing content. A few weeks ago the site was shut down thanks to an injunction obtained by the film studios which halted bandwith to the site due to pirated content. The Pirate Bay just announced a new bandwith host, the Swedish Pirate Party.
It’s a good move on The Pirate Bay’s part to seek some alternative to file sharing, a realm in which it has long reigned as king, or captain, or whatever you call a head pirate. It seems like those pesky government navy officers have their cannons aimed on the swashbuckling site. But dating? Well that’s just not going to work.
Published: Jun 1, 2010 03:07 pm