The Googler

__Name:__Chau Vuong

__Status:__Single millionaire

__Age:__33

__Location:__Los Angeles

__Interested in:__Solving the problem of finding a soul mate by creating a fully searchable database of love.

Chau Vuong, a 33-year-old former equity analyst who specialized in pharmaceutical companies at the investment bank Robertson Stephens, admits he's never kissed a girl. He hopes that one day he'll get married and lose his virginity. "I don't actually date," he explains. "I just research it." With a doctorate in pharmacy and a background in computer science, the self-described "extreme type-A personality" works full time on a desperately personal project: "to solve dating by turning Google into a global dating service."

Vuong's boyish smile and giddy laugh give him the air of an awkward college freshman. Vuong confides that he is "socially retarded in the real world," but he comes across as just plain innocent. It's easy to imagine having a blast with him watching Finding Nemo and drinking hot chocolate. It's harder to picture him in a romantic situation.

Vuong is the author of an underground Internet classic, The Soulmate Manifesto, a cost-benefit analysis of romance that proposes "a mathematical model that could predict and explain all human behavior pertaining to love." Lately, he's been all over the Net with his theories about using statistical analysis to find a date. A few months ago, he launched an online dating service, SocialGrid, which he promised would "change the world." Nobody was sure if he was kidding or serious.

When I meet Vuong for lunch at a hip LA diner near Beverly Hills, it's clear he's not kidding. As soon as we sit down, he whips out his laptop to show off its 12-hour battery. He tells me about the Grid. "It's just like bioinformatics, where you're searching for a sequence of code in a pool of DNA," he explains. "But the DNA is all the Web pages in the world."

His idea is as simple - and as simplistic - as HTML. The lovelorn use Vuong's trademarked Identification Coding System to convert their every physical, intellectual, and psychological attribute into a string of characters. Then they post the code on their Web sites. SocialGridsters can surf Google for their ideal mate by typing in their most-wanted combination of codes. They can customize their searches to locate people of a particular height, religion, educational background, even level of risk tolerance. In Vuong's world humans become fully searchable, utterly logical, machine-readable data. It's an eccentric courtship strategy but it suits Vuong perfectly. "My ideal date is to go somewhere with our laptops and do work," he says with a grin.

Spinning his computer around, he invites me to try his Soul mate Calculator, an app he wrote to convince people that they need his SocialGrid technology. A page full of pulldown menus and checkboxes boots up: The calculator uses a simple script to crunch US census figures on age, gender, and geographic location to estimate how many people I'll have to meet before I find my soul mate. To fill the thing out I need to decide what my potential mate's ethnicity should be, and whether I want him or her to be in the top 10 percent of people in terms of facial attractiveness, optimism, or musical talent. Also, how compassionate do I want my soul mate to be? Top 50 percent? Top 1 percent?

I have no idea what to check, so I ask the expert. Vuong confides that he always picks "top 1 percent" on everything. The calculator crunches my data and tells me I need to meet 200 million people to find my true love. "It's a numbers game, and I can lower the search cost for people," Vuong says.

Vuong's not only the owner of the SocialGrid, he's the number one client. "If I was a tall, good-looking white guy, I'd be on The Bachelor," he sighs. "But I'll never make it on there. I'm a nerdy, short Asian guy." Recently, he looked into how much it would cost to put a personal ad up on a billboard next to the freeway.

Resting his chin in his hand, Vuong fiddles with his tuna sandwich. As our coffee cools, I wonder aloud if Vuong's romantic quest leaves him lonely. "In reality, your soul mate is yourself," he replies with a laugh, wrapping his arms around his shoulders in a hug and then kissing his own hand. "It's like Mariah Carey says," he tells me, surprising our waiter with an impromptu serenade: "The hero lies in you."

The Blogger

__Name:__Christopher Filkins

__Status:__Single dad

__Age:__36

__Location:__Los Angeles

__Interested in:__Cutting out the middleman with a P2P-style online dating service that's free, private, and customizable.

By day, Christopher Filkins works as a webmaster and site designer for specialty condom distributor Condomania. By night, he's Filchyboy, publisher of a much-read blog. He delivers a running shtick about the futility of dating in Los Angeles. He's tried them all: Match.com, Spring Street Networks, Yahoo! Personals. "I joined a lot of online dating services," he recalls, "but I wound up just dissecting how the sites were put together, which I tend to do with a lot of things."

Then one day he had a realization: Dating should be more like blogging. So he began coding something he calls the Dating Syndicate.

When I arrive at the Condomania offices to meet Filkins, he's finishing up some business on the phone. I wander around his workspace while he talks, peering with mild trepidation into giant candy jars full of tricolor condoms and shiny plastic packets of lube. In one room, I discover a "condomenorah." Condoms of various hues and sizes are attached to nine PVC pipes arranged to resemble Hanukkah lights. Filkins joins me and grins as his colleague flips a switch, sending air through the pipes and allowing me to inspect the wares in their fully operational state.

Surrounded as he is by contraptions and condoms, it seems only natural that Filkins would turn to technology for a solution to a romantic conundrum.

Filkins wants to wed online dating to open source software to create the first dating service with a peer-to-peer type of architecture. The idea is a little like Vuong's SocialGrid, but far more sophisticated. And, Filkins hastens to add, a lot more private. "If I'm married and want to screw around on the side, I wouldn't want to post that on Google," he says. "I've perused all the dating sites, and what people want most is privacy."

At the core of the Dating Syndicate is a relatively untested open source protocol called FOAF (friend of a friend). This is a flavor of XML file that holds data on a person's attributes: body type, interests, friends, and assorted other personal information. Like all XML file types, FOAF files are platform-independent, although Filkins plans to keep all the Dating Syndicate FOAF files on a secure server to ensure user privacy.

Multimedia pioneer Marc Canter's fledgling Friendster-esque social networking site, People Aggregator, is built on FOAF. The beauty of the system, he says, is that personal data can be searched and assembled as easily as blog entries are now. "You can't break down relationships to the ultimate granularity," Filkins admits, but you can keep up with who's looking for a hookup.

Filkins imagines the Dating Syndicate as a vast, distributed network of love-seekers who access one another's profiles P2P-style, thus avoiding the centralization of a Match.com or Spring Street. "I'm not positive I can make money out of this, but I've had a lot of interest from the blog community," he says. Personally, I'm taken with the idea.

"Basically, if I can get a date out of this, it would be great," Filkins says, flashing an infectious smile. Which leaves me wondering: Why does this guy need to hunt the Web for a date? He's got a sweet face and even sweeter personality. A single dad, he glows with pride when he describes how his 6-year-old daughter is starting her first blog. "It's just hard to find somebody to date when you have a kid," he explains.

Because he's had such a hard time finding someone, Filkins spins out endless scenarios for dating hyper-personalization. "I would design the initial set of questions that people answer to create their FOAF file," he says. "Then there would be a system available to build new ones. If, for example, transsexuals wanted to use the protocol, they could come up with their own particular set of questions to ask."

The Sniffer

__Name:__Kevin Burton

__Status:__Swinging single

__Age:__28

__Location:__San Francisco

__Interested in:__Wardating: using every trick in the hacker playbook to get geeks the girls they never had a chance with in high school.

There are two kinds of optimizers: those who write programs, and those who hack what other people have written. Kevin Burton is a perfect example of the latter. With his all-American look, Burton seems to have just stepped out of a Gap ad. But that doesn't mean he can meet women on his own. For that, he relies on a sneaky little program he invented called the AIM Sniffer.

The cofounder of an Internet startup, Burton spends his days coding in Wi-Fi-enabled cafés and using his AIM Sniffer to keep an eye on all the data traveling over the cafés' networks. Between marathon Java-thrashing sessions, he often finds he wants to introduce himself to "a cute girl with a laptop" but is too shy to make an approach. That's where the Sniffer comes in handy. If a hottie fires up her AOL Instant Messenger client, Burton sees her login name and can send her an IM. "I've gotten several first dates that way," he says. "Women think it's cute when I can make a message pop on their machine as if by magic. Now that so many women are online, it's our chance as geeks to start getting more dates."

He calls the process wardating, in homage to the old-school hacker practice of wardialing, calling every possible combination of numbers to find open computer networks.

"IM is my medium," Burton says with a laugh. "If I can get a girl to respond to my chat message, I'm golden." The trick, he confides, is to deploy certain "social hacks" in the instant message. "Like smiley-face optimization," he says. "You can say anything to a girl if you put a smiley face or a wink after it. I've said things like 'You should come over to my house and have sex with me. :) :) :)' and it's fine because they just think I'm joking. And then, more often than not, they'll come over and have sex with me!"

It sounds more like a wet dream than reality, but the glint in Burton's eye makes me a believer. The guy just doesn't have that twitchy, hungry look I associate with sexual desperation.

Despite Burton's erotic conquests, his AIM Sniffer is still buggy. He once IM'd the wrong person in a café. A woman opened her laptop at the same time as a man, and Burton mistakenly wrote a flirty message to the guy. "He got really angry and threatened to call the cops, until I explained to him what I was doing," Burton recalls. "Then he got into it and started IMing me about all the cute girls in the café he wanted to meet."

Wardating isn't limited to the world of Wi-Fi. Burton says he's written dozens of hacks, including a bot that combs Craigslist personals and IMs him when it finds a candidate that meets his specs. But his favorite is a browser plug-in for the dating site Hot or Not. "The problem with Hot or Not is it keeps presenting the same pictures over and over because it's random," he explains. "My plug-in remembers which ones I've seen and will skip them. That way I can get through the whole site. When I did that, I had about 50 hot women spamming me the next day."

Gaming the system like this doesn't bother Hot or Not cofounder James Hong. "As long as he's not selling it, more power to him," Hong says. "It's dating Darwinism - survival of the fittest. He can outthink, outwit, outplay, and outhack the other guys. That's very cool."

The Stalker

__Name:__Jonathan Moore

__Status:__Happily married

__Age:__27

__Location:__San Francisco

__Interested in:__Exposing vulnerabilities in social networks.

How dirty can dating tricks get? To find out, I head to a coffee bar in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to meet software engineer and entrepreneur Jonathan Moore and his two pals. When I arrive, they are set up around a forest of laptops covering two tables. "Need some juice?" one asks, gesturing to a power strip by the wall. I do.

These guys churn out hacks that thin the membrane between dating and stalking. They spend their afternoons chronicling and exploiting the vulnerabilities in dating sites and social networks. But the strange thing is, they're not doing it to meet women. They don't care about getting lucky. Moore, in fact, is married and has a baby daughter.

Looking like a young mope-rocker, Moore explains that he wants to call people's attention to the potential dangers of dating and networking online. "The security holes in Friendster definitely make it easier for someone to stalk a stranger," he warns, a hank of hair covering one eye. His friends nod in unison.

Moore has written several Unix shell scripts that run on-the-fly background checks on people who use wireless networks in his neighborhood. With the help of the popular network-traffic analysis utility Netcat, his script "sniffs all the traffic on the Wi-Fi network, greps for email addresses, and looks them up on Friendster." Then the script sends Moore an email that includes a link to the users' Friendster profiles, along with their pictures and login IDs.

At a time when it seems that nearly everyone has a Friendster account, Moore says, "You can do really creepy stuff. You can get the profiles on everyone in your local café, then see who their friends are, and just walk up to them and ask, 'Aren't you Tom's friend?'" More disturbing, Moore's toolkit allows him to get zip codes and last names, making it easier to track down the real-world addresses of his targets, thus opening up a whole new universe of creepiness. "You could do all sorts of mean things," he says.

And Moore doesn't need an insecure Wi-Fi connection to suck up private data. For a while he had a script running on MySpace, another social network. Whenever anyone looked at his profile, a dialog box would pop up on their computer and say you are now my friend, and "forcibly add me as a friend to whoever was looking." As someone's "friend," Moore gains access to personal information from his target.

Moore's buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks at his profile and clicks through to his Web site. "I get their user ID, email address, age, plus their full name. Neither their full name nor their email is ever supposed to be revealed," he says.

Notified of the security holes Moore and Chisholm exploit, Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, "We have a policy that we are not being hacked." When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, "Security is a big concern. We haven't seen this problem, though. No complaints about it."

Of course, the more hopelessly out of touch a dating site is, the more it encourages geeks to innovate around it. Today's dating hacks will be tomorrow's Friendster or Match.com.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) documents geek life in Techsploitation, her nationally syndicated weekly column.

credit Photo by Chris Cuffaro

Chau Vuong



credit Photo by Chris Cuffaro

Christopher Filkins



credit Photo by Chris Cuffaro

Kevin Burton



credit Photo by Chris Cuffaro

Jonathan Moore

Dating Optimizers

The Googler

The Blogger

The Sniffer

The Stalker