EricTheViking writes:

1. Why is it that I have much more success if I use the photos of some good looking guy on my profile? I thought looks don’t matter but if I looked like that guy I could have sex with a new 9 every week.

2. Why is it that you guys don’t use Facebook to find girls? Why dating sites»? I have tons of hotties on Facebook (literally hundreds), so could you, why use dating sites»? I’m really interested in an answer to this question.

Let’s answer these questions in turn…

First of all, because it’s impossible to generate rapport immediately online like it is in person, photo’s are EXTREMELY important in online dating.  In real life, when you approach a girl, you can use your personality to engage her and trigger her emotions, which can by-pass most critical factors when it comes to your looks.  However, on the internet, you just have your profile, and its a “buyer’s market.”  Plus, most dating sites are geared AROUND pictures.  Many people just search based on abbreviated profiles that show nothing BUT pictures, and maybe a few other tid-bits, such as username, location, and age.

This makes it more like a process where you’re buying a car.  You just want to look at the cars that look coolest to you, and ignore the other cars because they don’t have the look or color you want.

I actually did some tests a while back where I had profiles on online dating sites without pictures, and I just said “if you want to know what I look like, I’m happy to send you some pics, but I’m a private person so I don’t like to post them publicly.”  This actually got a much better response rate because my written profile and emails were so good, that women who might not have given me a second glance actually became interested to know what I looked like.  So there are ways to get around this, but if you do any serious online dating, you gotta know that pics rule, so you need to have good ones – even if you don’t post them, because eventually the girl WILL want to know what you look like.

To answer the second question, I actually use Facebook A LOT to meet women.  (I met my current gf on there in fact.)  I actually think Facebook is WAY better to use than sites like Match.com and EHarmony.  However, it’s important to note this one factor:

Facebook is NOT a dating site!

In fact, Facebook has taken steps to make it HARDER to meet random women on the site because they were getting so many complaints from their female users about guys they didn’t know randomly trying to friend them.  So Facebook is not set up to help people find romance.  Sure, there are ways to USE Facebook to meet smoking hot chicks and hook up with them.  But none of them are very intuitive.

Also – if anyone cares – I think MySpace is actually a goldmine for finding girls who are just down for hooking up.  So if you’re looking for easy lays, that’s the site to check out.  Facebook can be used for that too, but its a little more difficult and time consuming than MySpace.