Make a date with a new you

Click on More Pictures for fullsize Virtual Harbour Cruise image.

Dating chat sites are often regarded to be a voyeur's haven - breeding grounds for unsavoury types - and a place of fantasy where you can be someone completely different.

They sometimes struggle to gain credibility with people who join with the best intentions of finding a lifetime partner or a good friend and end up meeting people who have no respectability.

Andrea Skews is well aware of the perils of dating sites; she and her friends have tried out a few in New Zealand and Australia over the past few years and were confronted by men who's lack of credibility was immediately obvious.

Skews, a former IT systems administrator in the medical field, has set up a virtual social website with her husband Peter Lockhart to address the problem.

"I went on one site and within 10 minutes, a guy came on, said let's meet in 10 minutes, and well you can imagine the rest of what he had to say."

Her friends, in their 30s, who used dating sites often came across married men, or travellers, who just wanted a brief affair.

Also, Skews found in New Zealand there are a lot of dating sites for adults but no socially interactive sites for people who just wanted to chat online in a platonic sense.

New Zealand and Australia's dating social websites are text only, hard to absorb, with pages full of short slang and abbreviations.

"I became very disillusioned with what we seemed capable of providing for our singles and for onliners to interact with so came up with the idea of a chat site for Kiwis and Aussies made in a virtual world."

Their website www.socialise.co.nz was launched two weeks ago, and is aimed at decent types. It is not just about dating, but friendship and networking as well.

It is the first website in Australia and New Zealand which uses virtual chatrooms - where you pick an identity, right down to the clothes, colour of your hair and skin.

Women can choose to be dressed in a halter neck and jeans, evening dress, and bikini and the men can choose between a dress suit, boardshorts and T-shirt, or trousers with formal shirt.

A member can invite another member on a virtual outing to a zen garden, restaurant or fun park and for those who want a communal outing, a night club, cafe, beach or harbour cruise is available.

And it is all rather life-like in a cyber kind of eerie way.

In the night club, the lights change colour, on the beach, the sea moves and seagulls fly overhead, and there is a flashing light above the Cafe 66 sign in the cafe.

People can judge personalities by virtual dates; designed to cut out the dross and sinking feeling often experienced on blind dates.

"Virtual dating is the middle ground between dating sites and meeting in real life.

"You can sit close together or apart and gauge a person's personality a bit," said Skews.

People who go on a virtual date and want to meet each other in real life can arrange a booking, but don't be too disappointed when your date or friend does not turn out to be a Johnny Depp or Cate Blanchett.

On the website, people dress up for fun; so far Skews has found the young men like to dress up like their favourite movie character. One middle-aged woman even made herself appear like a goth.

So doesn't it encourage people to hide behind a false identity, lie, and pretend to have good intentions?

Members will be able to gauge a person's character by using their intuition - just like in real life, Skews said.

"People have intuition, they just have to use it on this site. Just like in real life, if they sense that someone is not telling the truth, then they can act on it.

"Just like down at the pub, you can tell if a person is lying or not. It doesn't take Einstein to work that stuff out."

All types of inappropriate behaviour is banned and communal chatrooms are policed by moderators (who always have a dog with them) who can boot people out of chatrooms and ban their accounts, but moderators report to management and need permission to ban users.

Users can put a bad or good mark on a person's profile, if they have had a bad experience on a virtual date or a real date. All members have to confirm their address and have calendars to record virtual and real outings with other members for added safety.

Skews took 18 months to create the site, from first concept to finish, and her main challenge was finding a company to do the graphics.

"So many companies balked at the graphics and said it was not possible to do. I had an extensive search overseas and in New Zealand before I found Fresco, a New Zealand company," she said.

People get a free trial for 21 days and can still chat in the communal chatroom if they don't set up an account.

"We just want to get it populated and people enjoying it," said Skews.