With all due respect to people who use or provide services similar to this on Craigslist, Twitter, and the aforementioned Facebook, please go out and mix it up rather than stay home and clog Internet bandwidth. Andrew Garfield's painfully awkward scene with Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man (and a similar scene with Stone again in 2007's Superbad) may have been all too real, but that's the charming point of interacting and asking someone out. The Internet's handhold over smartphones, SMS text messaging, real-time chat, and "social" sites has made avoiding encounters easy (and superficial encounters too easy). Technology, which is supposed to improve life, has become a crutch to one of the more fundamental human skills.
Peter struggles for words.
Screencap from The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Media for men such as Askmen.com, FHM, and Maxim would have you believe that 99% of the single men out there have no problems meeting a young lady and making like James Bond and shagging the Living Daylights out of her. If that's the case, why are there so many online dating sites up and virtual girlfriends like Sophie making a killing out there?
Obviously, meeting people in real life is never as simple as in the old movies and TV shows. Women like Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire (1996) actually never quit their jobs for you and you don't meet damsels in distress in the market who turn out to be a princess as Jasmine turned out to be in Aladdin (1992). The 80s TV icon MacGyver (1985-1992) never got it on with 90% of his leading ladies in the 7 seasons he was on the tube, but he at least charmed the hell out of them. Like most people who spent most of their time alone with their books and/or computer hardware, my social skills aren't nearly as effective but I don't exactly sign up online just to desperately meet people or acquire "virtual" relationships.
"Who needs social networking?"
Screencap from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
In the third season of the British comedy series, The IT Crowd, which was aired in late 2008, an episode lampoons social networking through a fictional site called "Friendface" (a portmanteau of Facebook which started services in 2004 and the once-popular Asian site Friendster which was launched in 2002). Jen, the inept IT manager in the series, finds herself succumbing to the hazards of social networking addiction.
Jen obsesses about Friendface.
Screencap from The IT Crowd episode "Friendface"
The behavior she exhibits in the episode "Friendface", from answering messages till morning to meeting up with old friends and lying about her life, is played for laughs. I don't pretend to understand the complexities of social networking since I'm not exactly a social networking user (I actually understand the Hadoop servers and server boards that run the backend more than Facebook itself). However, within 15 minutes into the show, The IT Crowd episode accurately forecasted the negative effects of social networking, which include crippling social skills, online addiction, and habitual prevarication. Four years after the episode has aired, the spread of Internet broadband is accompanied with the spread of sites like Facebook and Twitter, which have deeply penetrated society and affected how people date and socialize with each other.
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