Technology PR:
Los Angeles, CA May 13, 2008 -- Newly launched OfficiallyDating.com enables couples to declare their love online. It seeks to celebrate monogamy for those not quite ready for marriage. What Facebook does for singles, OfficiallyDating does for couples.
OfficiallyDating.com - Main Page
Most couples have the natural, human compulsion to let the world know that they're in love. This phenomenon crosses cultures and spans millennia. Ancient ancestors marked their relationships by painting walls and chiseling stone. Particularly in the early 20th Century, couples carved their initials on trees. In the 1980s and 1990s many accomplished the same goal with graffiti. However, culture always evolves. Modern young women no longer wear their boyfriends' "pins", "graduation rings" and "varsity jackets". So, other than seeing a wedding ring, that perennial icon, it can be surprisingly difficult to discern if someone is available.
Even for those one might think are removed from this phenomenon, such as married and single people, there's the current common curiosity to know who's seeing whom. OfficiallyDating.com stakes its claim to be the 21st century solution.
Nearly every couple eventually has to have "the talk" to answer the big questions. Are they dating or officially dating? Are they going to be exclusive? If it's a workplace affair is it going to be made public? OfficiallyDating.com is the central site for the responses.
Users can search its database to find out if the object of their affection is already "officially dating" someone else. By having a unifying database that compiles the dating status of potentially everyone, users don't have to worry about asking someone out who is already "taken".
Connecting people is another benefit. Couples like to hang out with couples and singles often want to keep to themselves. Using normal search features, users can find others in their area whom they'd like to meet. But instead of enduring a potential flood of pesky requests from random people, OfficiallyDating.com offers something special. This new innovation, the "Question Filter" will surely be copied by all of the major social networks. Previously, to connect to another person on other social networks, there were 3 basic settings:
1) anyone can bother you
2) only those who already know your email address can contact you
3) people link through a common friend
Now there's a new way. OfficiallyDating's users can set up questions to be barriers that keep the unwanted out and let those with correct responses connect. For example, the Question Filter can be used by a couple that wants to carpool with another couple that also regularly attends a local game. Their question could ask for information only another fan would know.
Dan Abrams, OfficiallyDating's founder and president, also created the search engine Optevi.com and has been producing reality television for over 10 years. Maybe seeing the trainwreck behavior of contestants on the reality and dating shows he produced (including NBC's "Meet My Folks") affected him. He explains the genesis of OfficiallyDating.com this way: "Reality TV's representation of relationships are too often fake and disheartening. When you're truly in love you want the world to know it's authentic. Our site helps people do that."
OfficiallyDating.com
