A catch and a half. (Time Out New York)

Look at this: Time Out New York finally put faces on those Craigslist personals section, in its new "Single Men Willing to Be Photographed" slide show. We know you've had a tough time finding men recently, but we really think you'll like this Williamsburg lawyer, Aaron. He is a very busy man, what with his bike training (it is what he does "all the time," which makes us wonder when he does his lawyer work), so make sure you have your own "similar hobby/career/problem." Because as they say, "similarities attract."

Also, he seems to have some judgmental attitudes toward his mother's yoga practice, but that is definitely something you two can work through, right?

Aaron, 32; lawyer; Williamsburg, Brooklyn

His ideal date: “I race bicycles in my spare time (all the time), so I end up spending a lot of my time (all the time) training. It would be great if you had a similar hobby/career/problem. My ideal date would be doing something active that I’ve never done before. Anyone up for cave diving? We can communicate via chalkboard and glow sticks! I’m also down for the coffee-then-a-yoga-class date. Just not the moaning, ohm-ing, ahh-ing, hmm-ing, froufrou, chanty yoga. My mom likes that stuff. You can hang out with her for those things.”

We know, it's kind of confusing what kind of yoga he's talking about, but to cover all bases for you, we have emailed Aaron and are waiting for a response to find out if his mother is available to go for a Bikram session on Thursday. It's never too early to start in on the future in-laws!

How to catch an iPhone predator. (ABC News)

With apps like Find My iPhone now built into most Mac products--and the NYPD is on it!--it's still difficult to, well, find one's iPhone, especially if it's been stolen. That's why one canny victim, Nadal Nirenberg, found a new way to find his phone, lost on New Year's Eve ... by posing as a woman on a online dating site.

When he saw his OKCupid profile being used by the suspect through his former iPhone 4, Mr. Nirenberg played his own game of To Catch a Predator, by hitting on his online avatar, pretending to be a sexy woman.

Freudenberger. (David Jacobs)

One of the more recent entries in the annals of literary hype that threatens to overshadow actual achievement is Nell Freudenberger. Back in 2001, when the recent Harvard grad was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, her short story “Lucky Girls” was published in the magazine, and she soon became known, both in New York publishing circles and beyond, as a wunderkind. She happened to be attractive. “Too young, too pretty, too successful” said the title of an article by Curtis Sittenfeld, in Salon. But then came a well-received first novel, The Dissidents, and a short story, “An Arranged Marriage,” in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction issue, in 2010, and awards, like the PEN/Malamud. And now with her second novel, Newlyweds (Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95), an extended version of “An Arranged Marriage,” comes her most successful effort yet, one that shows a more mature voice and the true triumph of her talent over her hype.

As she did in The Dissidents, Ms. Freudenberger has again taken on a foreigner’s acclimation to life in the U.S. Newlyweds’ appealing protagonist, Amina, is a young, slender Bengali (e)mail-order bride who grew up in and around Dhaka, the only daughter of a hapless dreamer of a father and an ailing mother. The novel follows her to Rochester, N.Y., where she meets her fiancé, George, an unambitious engineer who lives in a generic three-bedroom house on a suburban cul-de-sac, learns the meaning of words like “dumbstruck” and how to shovel snow, and gets a job as a sales clerk at a local retail store called MediaWorks.

George met Amina, we learn, through the online dating service AsianEuro.com, to which he had come in the wake of personal troubles. He fell for her because “she was ‘straightforward’ and ... did not play games.” She saw an opportunity to escape her circumstances in a man who seemed honest and well-to-do.

In Rochester, Amina came face-to-face with the banal reality of what “arranged” entails, at least in the beginning—unpleasantly cordial sex and responsibilities, not to one another, but to some greater sense of the American Dream. Meanwhile, Amina attempts to keep intact her ties to her family back home, saving up what little money she earns at MediaWorks and, later, Starbucks to send to her parents, and set aside for citizenship and visa applications. Ms. Freudenberger captures how Amina’s panic at getting lost in a shopping mall on her first day of work becomes, strangely, a source of almost erotic excitement:

It was like a nightmare. She had a physical sensation of panic; if she’d had to describe it, she would’ve said it was in her stomach—although it was more like a lightness in her sexual organ, a feeling that sometimes came upon her at surprising moments (unfortunately not when she was doing that with George). She could hear her mother’s voice, Inshallah, but it wasn’t God’s presence she felt. It was her mother’s hovering beside her just as she had every day Amina visited the British Council, traveling all the way there and back with her by rickshaw so that Amina wouldn’t have to go alone.

Where Ms. Freudenberger excels, generally, in Newlyweds is in her understanding of familial love and the comical side of learning to live in a foreign land—no mean feat when you consider that she is, herself, a native New Yorker. (She was inspired by a young Bengali she met on a flight to Rochester.)

Many of Amina’s experiences in Rochester—spending time alone with manager Carl in the stockroom at MediaWorks, drinking Aunt Cathy’s sangria at family dinners, even remaining unmarried to George in her parents’ eyes (having failed to have a proper Deshi ceremony)—should have made her uncomfortable, she decides in retrospect, but she is quick to take note that “they had happened only to her American self, a person about whom her Bangladeshi self was blissfully unaware.” It is only in the latter half of the novel, when she returns to her native Bangladesh, and her family, that her new life comes in conflict with her old one. Waiting for her in Rochester is a husband whose past, uncovered, remains unresolved. In Bangladesh is Nasir, a family friend and childhood crush with whom she shares a past she was once eager to leave behind, but now  just as eagerly embraces. Amina experiences a disorientation that cuts to her very core:

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Unlike in The Dissidents, which was criticized for spreading its focus too thinly among a cast of displaced oddballs, Ms. Freudenberger, in The Newlyweds, keeps her lens trained on Amina, and it’s a good move. Amina is unpretentious, a character who shares a common language with the reader. Her perceptions of her new life are inflected by her unfamiliarity with America and those of her past in Dhaka brought to life in an angry vividness where discontent finds anything and everything to latch onto. Ms. Freudenberger’s masterful prose makes comprehensible how someone can become a stranger in two places at once.

mwoodsmall@observer.com

Hello, Sergio.

Launched in 2008, Webkare was a Japanese dating site with a twist: instead of pairing women with actual mates, it provided virtual boyfriends. Silly, right? But it received 3.5 million page views during its first five days of operation and helped spark a nationwide craze for cybermates. Not to be outdone, Japanese men began playing a similar game, LovePlus+, available on the Nintendo DS, and even began jetting off for weekend getaways with their virtual babes in the town of Atami, which eagerly started catering to such activities.

True, certain Japanese customs can seem a little unusual. But once you get past the initial queasiness, such innovations can exercise a strange appeal. After all, over the years, 75 million virtual pets, known as Tamagotchis, were sold worldwide. And love, as we all know, is all about projection—a trick of the mind. Is having a digital dude really so different from forming an attachment to a doll, say, or a really adorable Beanie Baby monkey named Bongo?

At least that’s what I told myself recently, when my boyfriend, Skip, took off for the weekend on a boys’ retreat to the Caribbean.

The afternoon of his departure, I sat alone at home, yearning for contact, entertainment and companionship. On a lark (that’s all it was, I swear), I surfed over to the local equivalent of Webkare, Get Boyfriends. 

Free to join, Get Boyfriends was launched in 2008 by Impulse Communications. The same company also runs Cyber Infants and Adopt Me, sites that cater to people seeking solace through virtual children and pets. About 62,000 people have used the service, which generates just $50 a month in ad revenue, according to Eric Borgos, who runs Impulse and handles the day-to-day operations of hundreds of domains.

The objective—to keep your on-screen beau happy by taking him out, playing games and writing love letters—seemed straightforward enough, albeit rather antiquated. Late-night sexting was not an option, nor was the application of hot fudge to sensitive areas of the body, but I was sick of chocolate anyway.

To start, I was directed to select and name my boyfriend, a process that I found unexpectedly absorbing. For a solid five minutes I assessed the various cartoon gentlemen before settling on an adorable dark-skinned fella wearing an untucked shirt, a blazer and khakis, pictured squinting and smiling broadly—obviously because I’d just made an incredibly witty remark.

I named him Cormac.

The following then appeared beneath Cormac’s picture: “Hi melber. You’re a very special girl and I am happy you are my girlfriend.”

Twisted though it clearly was, I felt a little surge of satisfaction reading that. Clearly obligated to reciprocate, I scoured the options on the main menu and decided to give him a little token of my affection.

As I soon learned, one has to accumulate Best Boyfriend points to buy items from the shopping center such as an iPhone (250 points), a Movado watch (50 points), a leather jacket (100 points) or Polo cologne (20 points). The Pawn Stars fan in me zeroed in on the massively undervalued timepiece. I just had to figure out how to score. 

In the meantime, I decided to send Cormac a little mash note, but I found I was limited to prepackaged platitudes from a drop-down menu. I selected “You’re so cute when you smile.”

Because it was true.

Cormac replied immediately. “I love you, baby.” We’d only just met, and already he’d gone there!

The note had also earned me 25 Best Boyfriend points. For a moment I was transported back to fifth grade, when I developed an embarrassing crush on the somehow absurdly attractive fox in Disney’s Robin Hood. Maybe that was the point. Cormac will never expect me to primp. Nor will he expect me to make clever remarks over dinner. And I will never, ever have to endure his impressions of my orgasm face.

After tending to a few real-life duties, I logged on to find Cormac as smiley as I left him, totally immune to the downpour outside.

“I miss you so much. Let’s go play a game,” he suggested.

Obediently, I clicked on the gaming menu and chose Pop Boyfriends.

Seconds later, a collection of mini Cormac heads started shimmying northward on my screen. I was responsible for bursting as many as possible. I hit 14 and missed 10 heads, a lackluster performance, but I was 25 points richer as a result, enough for the watch.

“I just want to say that I love you,” he said, after receiving my gift.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, Cormac and I went roller skating, took a few long walks, went bowling and watched movies. Meaning, of course, that I clicked on the aforementioned activities and racked up points. And yet, I felt satisfied.

Until the following morning.

I checked on my man first thing, only to be greeted with a message: “I’m ready to breakup with you.” Apparently, the site is very sensitive to extended periods of time when a user is not logged in.

“You’re too needy, anyway,” I said before finally leveling with him. “I’m seeing someone else.”

Cormac didn’t flinch. He just stood there, taunting me with his pixilated grin and his refusal to move or speak or fucking be a real person.

Men.

melanie.berliet@gmail.com

Up until recently, Snap was a conservative business, relying on its quarterly profits to slowly expand its staff. But when news broke that Goldman Sachs had invested in Facebook at a $50 million valuation, shares of Snap Interactive rose more than 1,000 percent. That allowed Snap to raise $8.5 million through a private placement of stock, providing the funds for an ambitious plan to expand its small team into a global dating empire.

The brainchild of brothers Darrell and Cliff Lerner, Snap was founded in 2005 as a standalone dating site. But in 2007, when Facebook opened its platform for independent developers to create apps, the brothers changed course. They raised $550,000 from friends and family and switched their focus to their Facebook dating app, AreYouInterested. 

"It was the Wild West days, just wide open, but still no one gave us much of chance," says Darrell. Snap was competing with established players like Match.com and social dating startups like Zoosk, which raised $40 million venture capital funding. "It was very important to us that we maintain our independence and control," says Darrell. "Even if it meant we had to watch every dime we spent." 

AreYouInterested now boasts 14 million active monthly users, more than twice as many as Zoosk, while Match.com has fewer than 5,000 monthly users on its Facebook app. Snap says it is adding more than 50,000 new users a day and has seen its revenue grow 230% since 2009, when it switched from advertising to subscription, reporting $2.7-2.8 million in revenue during the last quarter of 2010. 

The company was able to grow so quickly at first because there were few controls on viral marketing --a.k.a. spam invites-- in the early days of Facebook apps. That has put it in a unique position. "No new player in the space is going to be able to replicate that with all the restrictions Facebook has in place now," says David Evans, who runs the industry watchdog website, Online Dating Insider. Interestingly, Snap has continued to add users, while major social games like Farmville have seen their numbers decline since spam bans went into effect. 

Like Facebook itself, international markets are the next big target for Snap. "We have seen great growth in Europe but with just nine programmers couldn't afford to target our efforts," says Cliff. "Now we're going to be creating unique version of the service in local languages and integrating with the local payment platforms that are popular in each country." 

"We've always had to operate very lean, so this recent funding was a real game changer for us," says Darrell. "We're no Zynga yet, but expect us to use this capital to expand AreYouInterested in a big way and begin to work on some new offerings as well." 

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper

In the latest installment of OkCupid's dating research, The Mathematics of Beauty, the site reveals a few fascinating trends they observed about dating success.

Turns out raw beauty isn't the best metric. In fact, the more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more likely she is to be contacted for dates. The research finds that women who are considered ugly by some users have a better chance of attracting dates than women who are considered cute by nearly everyone. 

What's going on here? Could be a little gamesmanship at work.

If men see a profile of a user and everyone else thinks she's hot, they assume chances are pretty slim she'll pick them for a suitor.

But if guys see a girl who they think is cute, but who seems undervalued by others, they sense an opportunity. 

It could also be evidence that some men are strongly attracted to particular traits that the general population doesn't find attractive.

OkCupid's advice for the ladies? Take your flaws and play them up. The negative reaction you get from some users will only work to your advantage. 

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper

Fifteen years later, I've upgraded to broadband, kind of wish I still had the AFHV t-shirt, and still like to use the internet for everything possible. The realm of "everything" has expanded well beyond poetry contests, though, to include more grown-up pursuits such as watching cat videos and dating. In fact, I have regaled many a dinner party with my collection of OKCupid horror stories and victories (the victories occur less frequently). But no matter how many times I am forced to listen to a date sing MGMT at karaoke after six shots of vodka (this happened), I'm always open to trying the latest online dating platform, because hey--you never know.

So, when I was recently invited to attend an event a new online dating startup, Meetmoi, was hosting, I jumped. As it turned out, this wasn't your typical startup event: I wasn't expected to select an outfit that exudes professionalism yet joie de vivre, show up at a venue, put on a nametag emblazoned with my Twitter handle, and get to mingling. Instead, I was instructed to turn my phone on, sit back, and wait. 

Unlike other online dating communities, Meetmoi doesn't ask users to filter through potential matches based on their preferences ("You're a Scorpio with an average build who likes but doesn't own amphibians!? ME TOO"). In lieu of active searching, users install an app called MeetmoiNOW on their smartphones. They don't hear a peep until matches that meet their pre-specified guidelines wander into the vicinity. Then, and only then, MeetmoiNOW sends an alert, which arrives in the form of a kitschy heart inscribed with a compass-like arrow in the notification bar. If both users indicate interest by "accepting" the match, a chat functionality is enabled and they can figure out how to meet up right then and there.

The company had cooked up a special promotion, entitled "Drinks on Us," whereby if two participants met up at a predetermined bar suggested by Meetmoi via email, their first round of drinks would be on the house. Free things appeal to me as a general rule, and I was also intrigued by the spontaneous nature of the mission I'd chosen to accept. There's something a little sterile--and perhaps a little reminiscent of junior high--about instant messaging with a potential date. Dropping into a corner cafe at a moment's notice, on the other hand, is downright serendipitous! And it's appealing in the way that a Lifetime Movie Network feature starring Jennie Garth is appealing. A little farfetched, but likely not without entertainment value.

In practice, though, my attempt to land a date NOW proved a bit more difficult than anticipated. The freeform event lasted for a week, Monday through Friday. Monday, I was out of town. On Tuesday evening, back in the city, my phone buzzed--potential matches were within range.

Surprisingly, these men seemed normal, and so, purely as a matter of professional curiosity, I began chatting with them on my way to an industry event (the New York Tech Meetup--sweet irony).

A conversation with one clean cut, criteria-meeting bachelor trailed off. But another, with a soulful-looking guitar player (musical hobbyists, my Achilles heel!) got to the point of discussing location. I was walking past Washington Square Park, hoping we wouldn't have to meet at Josie Woods, when my potential date dropped the bomb that he was all the way over in Midtown East. Close as the crow flies, but not close enough for an immediate drink. I headed into the NYU auditorium to distract myself with my personal favorite geek panacea: tech demos.

When Wednesday evening rolled around, I felt the now familiar vibrating signal that indicates a nearby match. Another viable candidate popped up. But there was no reason to engage--I was already on the way to meet friends for drinks and couldn't take a detour to an impromptu meeting. By Friday, my proverbial battery--not to mention my cell phone's--was exhausted from the missed connections. A match came along, and though he seemed like a gainfully employed, dashing fellow, I couldn't stomach the 10 year-plus age difference, and I declined. 

And just like that, the week, and the offer for free drinks, had passed me by. Still, the application hadn't failed exactly--it had put me in contact with people I actually sort of wanted to meet. But now, in the "matches" tab, there was a graveyard of pictures marked "expired"--the connections I wasn't able to act on in time. I was the one who had failed, hesitating when I should have been prepared to meet someone NOW.

Despite the undeniable efficiency of most online dating sites, I still find myself—and many other single New Yorkers I know—kvetching about the inorganic nature of paging through all those disembodied profiles. But if we weren't so overscheduled to begin with, maybe we'd have time to meet people IRL, if you will. MeetMoiNOW aims to facilitate those in-person meetings, yet it was still so easy to pass each other by. We're booked.

Don't get me wrong--I love OKCupid. But anyone who's ever tried to sift through their matches, listlessly sorting people by language spoken (I prefer dates to speak English, but did you know that C++ is a possible selection too?), knows that having the right person sent directly to you like a mobile gift is an enticing proposition. Yet in order to let spontaneous matching work its magic, I knew I'd have to carve out some more room for spontaneity itself in my life.

Several days after the Drinks on Us event had ended, the telltale heart showed up in my notification bar. This time, I was ready. The suggested match fit the bill--tall, dark, and handsome enough--and I accepted right away. And waited. And waited. Perhaps stuck in the subway, or in a meeting, or just uninterested in a 5'4" Sagittarius with a petite build, my would-be Romeo was taking his time. After an hour, a message showed up below his username: "He didn't respond in time." I accepted the dose of electronic justice and vowed to keep on trying, free drinks or not.

alindow [at] observer.com

@annalindow

How About We, a NYC startup, has a simple formula for making online dating fun again. Make it about the dates.

On HAW, users propose and accept dates, e.g. "How about we... shoot the freak at Coney and then bike to Red Hook for a sunset picnic."

Sorry ladies, just an example, Tech Observer is taken.

The site announced today that it raised an A round of $3.1 million led by one of NYC's top VC firms, RRE.

According to Nick Saint at SAI, the funds will be used to staff up and expand.  "John Pignata from Pivotal Labs signed on as CTO and helped recruit three other developers. HowAboutWe will now add a marketing team as it pushes toward a national rollout in the next few months."