The dating website that went live in April 1995 and turned a personals column into a database with photographs. Every swipe-based app of the 2010s is a descendant, whether it admits it or not. The record's entry for the moment the internet started introducing people on purpose.
Seen in the gallery: Tinder, Bumble and Grindr named as the services that can thank Match.com for its pioneering. The record notes none of them have.
The record notes Match.com asked for essays, preferences and a photograph scanned at home, and that the labour involved was itself a filter. Apps removed the labour and, the record suspects, the filter.
A colleague showed me her Match.com profile in 2004 on the office computer, at lunch, and asked whether the photograph was too much. It was a photograph of her. That was the whole question then.
The gallery calls Match.com the world's first dating site. Smaller services were online a little earlier; the defensible claim is first major one, and the record keeps to that.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
