Christmas isn’t even here yet and the social networking giants Facebook and MySpace are already focusing on Valentine’s Day. MySpace will introduce members to a pickup artist, while Facebookers get access Match.com’s Little Black Book, both in efforts to help members’ love lives.
You remember in college when you had a large circle of male and female buddies and everything was awesome until two of the buddies started dating and then it just got weird? Well, Facebook and MySpace are looking to mimic that phenomenon online.
We’ll start with Facebook’s news because it’s less stupid. Match.com is expected to announce its Little Black Book widget for Facebook users on Thursday, which will allow the lonelier of users to connect with both available Facebook users and Match.com members.
If you’re too shy to even do online dating yourself, Match.com also introduced Match My Friends, which allows your friends and family to set things in motion for you via a profile they make.
Can you picture it? A profile from Mom goes like this: My son William is the sweetest boy, and so handsome, don’t you think? (Though I’ve tried to tell him all that gunk in his hair will make him go bald like his Uncle Maury.) He’s studying to be an accountant, just like his father, which means he’ll be a good bread-winner. Word to the wise, though, puppets and mannequins scare him, always have. And his feet turn inward, so dancing’s not the best activity.
Meanwhile, MySpace is living up to the classiness Rupert Murdoch and Fox bring to all of their endeavors. The king of social networks has brought former “seduction society” member and author Neil Strauss on board to produce a series of short videos based on Strauss’ dating guide “The Rules of the Game.”
The effort is cross-promotional as both MySpace and Strauss’ publisher HarperCollins are both owned my News Corp. And the videos also bring in some old Fox personalities the MySpace generation has probably never heard of. David Faustino, who played Bud in “Married With Children,” and Corin Nemec of the short-lived early Nineties series “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose” will be acting out “The Rules of the Game” in the videos.
Who exactly this benefits isn’t entirely clear, but it should be fun to watch.
