Will You be My Friend? A Qualitative Content Analysis of Friendster.com

With our increasingly impersonal and time-constrained world, many claim they are so busy that they do not have the time to find dates the old-fashioned way. Instead, more and more singles place personal ads in the mass media to find dates. Newspapers, the telephone, television and websites are among the places used to find “the one.” Essentially, personal ads are a meta-statement about the kinds of people we are [1]. Like advertisers, people use the personals to describe their characteristics and qualities. And also, like advertisers, they adjust such qualities and characteristics to what they believe potential dating partners are looking for [2]. As a result, the personals are considered by researchers to be rich sources of information on relationships and in mating strategies [3].