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November 19, 2005

Jamie Diamond, co-founder of TrueDater.com, runs the northern operation of the truth-in-online-dating service from his Grants Pass home. The service allows people to share their online dating experiences.
Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell

Truth in dating

Grants Pass-based Web site tries to help online daters find out who’s honest and who isn’t


By MARK FREEMAN
Mail Tribune

GRANTS PASS — In eight years of online dating, Marlo Weiss has seen far more in the men she dates than what they claim in their resumes.

Guys 40 pounds heavier or six inches shorter than their profiles. Men who don’t divulge their lisps, or perpetual eye-twitch. Married men who claim they’re not. A cop who thought he’d do better pretending to be an actor.

"My favorites are guys who have posted the same pictures of themselves on these sites for five years," says Weiss, a 32-year-old corporate trainer from New York City. "What? They haven’t aged?"

That’s why Weiss is part of a new truth-in-advertising movement among millions of online daters who now can use a Grants Pass-based Web site to share the skinny on whether these singles live up to their profiles.

TrueDater.com, a Web site co-founded by Grants Pass resident Jamie Diamond, is helping put honesty in the online dating experience by providing a venue for reviews of online singles, posted by the actual men or women who date them.

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The reviews are anonymous and generally focus on whether a person’s online image is accurate and profile answers appear to be true.

The free site allows members to warn others who is a "TrueDater" and who is not.

"People fall in love over the Internet before they even meet," Diamond says. "It’s not a matter that I wasted 20 minutes. It’s crushing.

"We let the online dating community talk amongst ourselves with the goal of getting more people to be honest and truthful," Diamond says.

Often, the posts are affirmations that a dater’s claims can be trusted.

After meeting an online dater who called himself "Giving it a Whurl" on Yahoo Personals, "EastCoast" wanted the online world to know he was a TrueDater.

"He is what he says — someone just out for some fun, something casual," EastCoast writes in her review. "Better conversationalist on IM (instant messaging) than in person, but what you see is what you get."

Others are not so complimentary.

After meeting dater 32822306 on Jdate, an online dating service for Jewish singles, "swift143" felt compelled to post a review.

"He totally decieved me with his picture," swift143 writes, misspellings and all. "In his picture he looks fit, muscular; in real life, he has this huge double chin. It’s so unavoidable! PLEASE DONT GO OUT WITH HIM! SAVE YOURSELF!"

Weiss, who dates exclusively online, says she reviews all cyberdates.

"Whether they’re scamming me or not, I post a review of them," Weiss says. "Even if they’re nice guys, that should be known."

Diamond, 30, says Internet daters deserve the same buyer-beware voice they get in other web-based enterprise.

"Amazon.com has book reviews," he says. "Why not have online dating reviews?"

In-house research by on-line dating services like Match.com shows that most online daters are "pretty honest in their profiles" in part because they realize they won’t get away with too much fudging, says Kathleen Roldan, senior public relations manager for Match.com in San Francisco.

"Our members know their goal is to meet face to face," says Roldan. "They know they’re going to have to live up to what they said in the profile."

But when they don’t, TrueDater.com provides the forum to call B.S. on them.

"Dr. Teddy is a pathological liar," "ScreenGoddess" wrote in an October review. "He is NOT divorced. Check him out on the Medical Board of CA’s website."

Jennifer Schmidt wishes someone like ScreenGoddess had warned her about some of her 30 online dates over the past five months.

"If someone was a creep they’d probably be a creep to you," says Schmidt, 33, of Beaverton. "It’s nice to have someone else’s view on it."

TrueDater has its roots in the Bay Area, where Diamond and co-founder Mark Geller were living and Internet dating amid Silicon Valley’s dot-com explosion of the mid-1990s. Geller tried to parlay the experience into a television sitcom that didn’t pan out.

But it morphed into the TrueDater concept in 2003 shortly after Diamond, a Grants Pass native, returned here.

With financial backing from anonymous investors, the pair launched TrueDater.com in January.

Diamond does not reveal how many people post reviews, nor how many reviews have been posted. But he says visits to the Web site have doubled each month and reached 400,000 in October alone.

"We didn’t realize how many people it would attract," Diamond says. "It’s amazing."

Reviews are listed by online service and the person’s identification number. Diamond or other TrueDater employees — he won’t reveal how many employees there are — check the reviews before posting them.

The site includes ads and links to various dating services.

To avoid creating he-said-she-said "food fights" on the site, Diamond says reviews should stick to whether the posted material is fact or fiction.

If the reviewers leave their date’s e-mail address, Diamond will forward a copy of the review to them.

He says less than a half-dozen have challenged their negative reviews. Many lead to updated pictures and corrected information on their profiles, he says.

"We even ask people to review themselves or have their friends review them," Diamond says.

Weiss believes TrueDater.com and other sites like it will explode in popularity as online daters discover them.

"It’s a necessity at this point," Weiss says. "Eventually, it will become part of the norm."

Especially if the norm continues to be online daters like "Cinderella" who wants to warn other Match.com daters that "Boots" may be a hunk on line, but turns into a pumpkin in person.

"Entire profile is lies, does not participate in the activities he said, talk about EXCESS BAGGAGE!!" Cinderella writes about Boots in her June 15 review. "Stay away!"

Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail mfreeman@mailtribune.com.




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