www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12236
By David Cassel, 23 AlterNet January 16, 2002 A startling and disturbing Web site recently rose to online notoriety. It welcomes visitors with a picture of a female, shown from behind, whom it describes as the perfect woman. She's attractive, intelligent, well dressed, and "Doesn't throw tantrums. We can watch her apartment and squeeze information from previous boyfriends. Though its postal address was in Dallas, the phone number belonged to a Ford dealership in Davis, California (no one at the dealership had ever heard of the site). The search for love has been a long-standing subject of parody on the Internet. Two years ago the page added a description of victory - which concluded with "a beautiful sunrise the next morning" - but those details have since been removed. Another page, started in April of 1999, purported to be the 26 log of two friends competing to see which of them could find a sexual partner first. The contest dragged on for 19 months, until it finally reached its anticlimactic conclusion. A Web site masquerading as that of a video-store 28 clerk stalker even drew the attention of Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. A 25-year-old Webmistress really did offer her services as an online temptress-for-hire to catch romantic partners that were cheating online. He created a Web site offering 29 a bounty of $10,000 to anyone who can find him a wife. Wednesday Barnett said that over the years his call for assistant cupids has drawn 1000 voicemail messages, 25,000 emails, and 2 million unique visitors. He's even set up an earnest voice-mail message about the importance of taking risks. In true geek fashion, while the enterprise seems a little ham-handed and obsessive, it's colored with a touching idealism. In the message he's left out for the world, he reminds those searching for love to keep their eye on the prize. As it does with the mysterious Nick, at Coincidence Design. Nick claims he replaced his true phone number with a fake one when his site's popularity began climbing in December. This, too, appears to be untrue, since the registration shows that phone number was input the day the site was created, 18 months ago. But putting aside questions about Nick - is his Web site a hoax or a legitimate business? When I put the Web site up it didn't really exist except as an idea in my friend Kevin's mind. A page detailing the company's origins was also changed. Though he claims that his friend Kevin does have the technical ability to install a phone tap. The changes seem to stem from the site's sudden burst of popularity in mid-December. She spotted the address for Coincidence Design on a mailing list for a group of campers at the yearly Burning Man festival. An even more popular Web-log named 33 Metafilter publicized Mondon's discovery, and soon Coincidence Design had been linked to by 80 other Web-logs, though some identified the site only with cryptic or sardonic phrases. Coincidence Design credited its appearance to 34 "Saber Works" - a company which listed only one other client, a site called Sensation Zone.
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