OkCupid is a free-of-charge social networking and dating website, which also offers features including user-generated content such as blogging and member-created quizzes.

OkCupid users are presented with questions (most of which are authored, submitted, and vetted by members) about various topics such as politics and tastes page by page, and given a list of up to four answers per question to choose from. They are also asked “How would your Ideal Match answer this question?”, and then “How important is their answer to you?”, with degrees of importance for the latter listed as “irrelevant”, “a little important”, “somewhat important”, “very important”, and “mandatory”, each respectively assigned a greater numerical value. The site uses the numerical values to calculate “friend”, “enemy”, and “match” percentages between any two members of the site based on how many answered questions those two users have in common (referred to as their “intersection”), with higher intersections supposedly producing more accurate percentages.

There is a very active journaling/blogging community on OkCupid as well. Members have the option of saving favorite users’ profiles and then “stalking” them, which allows them to view all of their new journal entries, as well as comments on others’ entries. The journaling community frequently arranges meet-ups of OkCupid users in various areas of the world and people travel, sometimes from as far away as other countries or continents, to meet. Sites of past meet-ups include London, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City, and Ann Arbor.

OkCupid is a service of Humor Rainbow, Inc. OkCupid’s founders, (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn) were students at Harvard University when they gained notoriety from their creation of TheSpark and, later, SparkNotes. Among other things, TheSpark.com featured a number of humorous self-quizzes and personality tests, including the four-variable Meyers-Briggs style Match Test. SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later being renamed OkCupid. The current OkCupid Dating Persona Test is still largely identical, in question and text blurb content and order, to the original Match Test. In 2001, they sold SparkNotes to Barnes & Noble, and began work on OkCupid.

In 2008 OkCupid spun off its test-design portion under the name Hello Quizzy (HQ), while keeping it indelibly linked to OkCupid and reserving existent OkCupid users’ names on HQ.

Links

• visit OkCupid