Summary: You've found someone online you want to email... Now what!? In this episode of DDP we dive into the details of writing emails to someone who has caught your online eye. Lara shares a cool SMS trick for rescuing yourself from a bad date and we hear from a listener who cautions cretins that her city just ain't big enough for shenanigans. - Direct MP3 Download - iTunes Subscription - RSS Feed Tweet Show Notes for episode 5 below… DDP Ep. 005 Show Notes On DDP episode numero cinco we talk about… What’s new with us? Joel saw the Social Network movie, Lara has plans to see it, and Joel has the new iPhone 4 (He’s in the process of checking out some of the apps available. We talk about breaking the ice online, and all the different ways sites have to help users make a first connection. You might be able to favourite someone, send a rose, wink at someone - showing someone that you’re interested without actually putting yourself out there. At what point do you want to make that first contact, or how do you react when someone first contacts you? We talk about some of the mechanisms that prevent users from contacting each other as well. Joel prefers to get an email rather than messing around with winking or those sorts of things. Next Joel wonders, when you receive a first message from someone, do you read the message first or go check out their profile first. We agree that we’d read the message first and get a sense about whether the person has made an effort, and then go check out their profile, probably before messaging them back. Lara asks, how long should a first message be? That’s a debatable point, but we both agree that messages can be too short - a phrase or simple ‘hey, what’s up?’ just doesn’t cut it. If you don’t have enough time to send a real message that shows you’ve actually read our profile, don’t both sending a message at all! Joel shares a great example of a female user on one of the dating sites with a great way to screen messages - at the foot of her very well filled out profile she had a code phrase (pineapple peanut butter, for example!) and if that phrase wasn’t in the subject line of messages, she wouldn’t even bother to open them. Smart. No matter how that first contact happens, Lara says the whole point is to get a conversation started. If each person doesn’t make an effort to ask a question or offer something about themselves that the other person can respond to, the conversation will die pretty fast. There needs to be a back and forth element. Send us your thoughts about making that first contact, and any funny stories you have! EMAIL Veronica sent us a story about running into a guy she met on Plenty of Fish and had dated briefly in Halifax last year, but things hadn’t gone far because he lived in another city and was only in town for a short while. When she saw him again he looked extremely uncomfortable, but she stopped to talk with him anyway. Turns out he has lived in Halifax the entire time, and got married only a few weeks after they stopped dating! He also completely lied about his type of studies and job, as party of telling Veronica that he lived in another city. Veronica was pretty unimpressed with the deception there. Ick! Veronica shared another story about her friend Betty, who went out a few times with a guy she also met on Plenty of Fish, Joe. When Betty described Joe to Veronica, Veronica thought he sounded a lot like a guy she knows, named Paul. So Betty pulls up Joe’s profile, and Veronica recognized Paul! Paul was using a fake name as part of his online dating presence. Lara wonders at what point in a relationship do you tell someone you’ve been lying about your name this whole time? Not exactly trust-inspiring! Plus Halifax is way too small to try something like this, maybe it’s possible to pull it off in a bigger city? LINK DU JOUR Lara mentions a site she found that will send you a text automatically and possibly get you
