Jean Meyer gets compared to Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, quite a lot these days; and he doesn’t mind one bit. Meyer is a business student at Columbia University and the co-founder of “Date My School” a dating website exclusively for students of certain colleges.

Meyer originally launched “Date My School” at Columbia, but has also launched the site for New York University, Fashion Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley, too. In April the site will go live at Harvard and MIT.

The premise of “Date My School” is slightly different than many other niche dating websites. Meyer’s take on college dating at such competitive schools was that students simply couldn’t find time for love because they were enrolled in competitive programs, focused on good grades and a good career and had little time on their hands. With “Date My School”, they can meet up with students at their own university, which makes it easier for them to spend time together. It also allows them to date people who will be more likely to understand their busy schedule.

“Date My School” doesn’t provide matching algorithms like many popular traditional dating sites, but it does allow students to be very particular about who sees their profile and who they want to date. Many students, for example, prefer not to match with others in their same program of study.

Jean Meyer, along with Balazs Alexa, has successfully pulled of another great niche dating site, meeting the needs of a very specific dating community. Meyer is French; maybe it’s true that the French know a bit more about love than the rest of us. You can read the full article on Jean Meyer and “Date My School” at the New York Times.

Reviews College, Facebook, School, Students

Speed dating: It’s not just for singles anymore.

Taking a page from its social dating network, Zoosk is launching a new approach to speed dating that is designed especially to help entrepreneurs and startup companies make contact with and match up with venture capitalists willing to invest their money. This new concept debuted in San Francisco in early May at the Web 2.0 Expo, and the idea behind it is both unique and potentially a gold mine.

The approach is simple. Startup companies register with Zoosk for the event, during which they will have the chance to “speed date” with several venture capitalists just as singles do during speed dating events. Each startup is guaranteed to receive at least three minutes of uninterrupted, undivided attention from the venture capitalists in the hope of capturing their interest enough to convince them to pursue potential funding agreements in more detail.

Is it going to work? We’ll have to wait and see what kind of results come out of it, but early indications are this unique approach to matching startups and venture capitalists was extremely popular. If nothing else it’s a clever way to latch on to the online dating model of operation and put it to use in an entirely different way. And who knows, maybe the event will produce a profitable “match made in heaven”!

News & Views Dating Business, Facebook, Zoosk

There’s a new player in the arena of matchmaking and connecting singles using Facebook. Littlehint is a startup company that claims to have a new and better way of collecting your Facebook friends, sorting them according to which ones might be best matched for dating, and then making it easy for those folks to connect with each other.

If it sounds a bit like Thread.com you’re right because the basic idea is the same. What’s different, though, is the Littlehint is setting itself up with more detailed questions to answer as part of your profile and is also working feverishly to allow users to submit their DNA profiles as well. DNA matching for singles is the hottest, newest, and most unproven method of matchmaking in the business right now so it’s not clear if this is really a selling point for Littlehint or not.

The way Littlehint describes its process is that they ask a series of questions to determine your sociological characteristics, assess your personality and psychological tendencies, and then use a function called “degrees of separation” to connect you with friends via your Facebook page. The catch? Your friends need to fill out a Littlehint profile, too, for the whole thing to work.

Is this the wave of the dating future? Who knows. But one thing is for certain, we’re going to be seeing more of these types of online dating tools so you need to stay as up to date as possible if you want to make the most of online dating opportunities.

News & Views Dating Applications, Facebook, Matchmaking, Personality Testing