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Picture, if you will, this heartwarming exchange, circa 2037.
"Grandma?" inquires little Junior. "Tell me the story of how you and Grandpa met."
"Well, dear," explains Grandma, "it all began when Grandpa posted a message looking for the hot girl from Starbucks with a piercing above her lip."
"That's right," Grandpa chimes in. "I was fed up with Match.com and Jdate.com and Eharmony.com, so I decided to do things the old-fashioned way."
"Old-fashioned?" Junior asks.
"That's right," says Grandma. "He had his eye on me for weeks but was too shy to say anything. So he tracked me down on the Web. A couple weeks of cyberflirting, a few months of dating and ... voila! The rest is history."
Scenes like this one will play out in countless living rooms of the future, if Mark Jaffe has his way. Jaffe is the founder of Kizmeet, a Web site devoted to "missed connections" now serving 10 U.S. cities (kizmeet.com).
"We don't think of ourselves as a traditional dating site at all," Jaffe said in a recent phone interview. "We're more of a throwback to traditional dating. You see another person and feel some sort of spark and the Internet is just facilitating things. It's a real-world connection where the chemistry happens first."
Missed connections, of course, are nothing new. Lovesick suitors have been taking out ads in the back of alternative newspapers for decades, hoping to reconnect with that gorgeous brunet standing outside Walgreens Saturday night or the tall, brooding bloke reading Jack Kerouac on the subway Tuesday morning.
Kizmeet just takes it up a notch. You can post a missed-connection message - or check if anyone posted one about you - by searching under the name of a specific bar, coffee shop, gym, grocery store or just about any other spot around the city where you may have caught someone's eye. Or you can click on a number of spots pre-selected by the Kizmeet folks. Say you attended a concert last weekend and want to know if anyone noticed how darn hot you looked. You'd click on "Concerts and Stadiums," choose your venue and read away.
"It creates that small-town feel," Jaffe said. "Maybe you're looking for someone you flirted with at your local coffee shop."---
By Heidi Stevens
Chicago Tribune
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