I am a fan of the concept, the idea, of niche dating sites — sites that cater to a specific group, such as republicans, dog lovers, or smokers, or followers of a certain religion. I think the niche sites can help you find someone that you have at least one thing in common with, whether it’s your geography or your values.
I recently came across a site called DesiHotPoint that caters to young desi singles (those from South Asia) which interestingly enough was started by a Cornell sophomore back in 2003, and has grown to a pretty good sized community. I love this kind of story — when something starts as an experiment and grows into something bigger because an unmet need has been tapped somehow.
The site claims 140,000 registered members, although, I’d wonder if like most dating sites, a good chunk of those are not particularly active members.
Note to readers: please drop me a line if you have an experience to share about this site.
The site does the usual posting of hot girls and hot guys on the home page. The site also offers a rating system, which feels a little creepy, but the college girls on the site seem to have gotten over the concept, at least enough to participate.
The search function seems pretty simple, you can search by country and sex — but I will say that they seemed to be experiencing some technical difficulties on the day I stopped by the site. A search for “females” in any country brought back 244 pages of results, although the search for “males” in any country or “both” in any country returned only a plain white page.
Ah well, we all experience technical difficulties on some days…
As with any site, be careful to protect your identity, choose a neutral location if you decide to meet offline, and don’t, under any circumstances, send money to someone you don’t know.
Stay safe out there.
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Dating Coach and Relationship Expert Lisa Daily is the bestselling author of two dating books — Stop Getting Dumped! and How To Date Like a Grown-up; and Fifteen Minutes of Shame – a novel. Lisa is also the dating coach on DAYTIME, a nationally-syndicated morning TV show. You???ve seen her everywhere from Entertainment Tonight to the Washington Post to the HITCH movie DVD starring Will Smith.
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