If you thought cyber love and the Internet was a fast match, just wait. Mobile telephone dating is fast and immediate, too, and Australia's largest online dating service has hooked up with a third-generation cell phone service to prove it.
"It is an inevitable evolution to the online dating phenomenon," said RSVP marketing manager Melanie Bowman, of RSVP's new service with Hutchison Telecom's 3 Network, a third-generation cell phone service, "and will be quickly adopted by daters who want access to instant loving any time."
At least one 3 Network customer told The Age the service won't mean the end of the mystery and art of romance. "It's kinda fun," said the woman, a hospitality industry worker who identified herself only as Millie. "Lots of people in the hospitality industry don't have access to a PC and they work long, irregular hours. We don't get to meet many new people."
She also said cell phone dating can make you feel a little more flirtatious. And, comparing it to a blind date, "you just go for it," saying the 3 Network offers just enough information to help make the decision about whether to take it any further.
According to RSVP, either party can launch the date—but there is indeed a price. The price is $39.95 for five "stamps" or $7.99 a date, equal to a vodka and tonic in a fancy pub. And women as much as men are liable to initiate a date, as Millie said she did. "I've had a couple of kisses and I'm thinking about it," she told The Age.
But another woman, an editor named Kerri, isn't exactly enthused by the idea. "There are plenty of people who really enjoy the many and varied features of mobile phones," she told the paper, "but speaking as a Luddite who almost didn't go on a phone plan because I had to get a phone with more than the most basic operations, it's not for me ... in the same way as WAP, polyphonic ringtones and downloading movie clips aren't for me. The kind of person who'd get into mobile dating wouldn't be my type, if only because he'd find me depressingly old-fashioned."
