Web of warmth

At the risk of sounding horribly smug, when a website has been as successful as Guardian Unlimited for a reasonable length of time...

At the risk of sounding horribly smug, when a website has been as successful as Guardian Unlimited for a reasonable length of time, you get used to people heaping praise on parts or all of your service. You also get used to users who, for one reason or another, write in to say they will never darken your portal8217;s gains.

There is one largely unsung part of the site that attracts the most astonishing testimonials and that has become something of a beating heart to our community. Soulmates, our dating site, is two years old and, by all accounts, thriving, with an active community of over 30,000. We have several marriages now chalked up to Soulmates8230;

What strikes me about this is how little taboo there now is around online dating: it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that people would regularly tell you about liaisons they had made through your classified ads. But as chat and email online has become the norm, then using the connectivity to meet people seems a simple, more acceptable step. The success of Soulmates raises again the question of online communication and whether it is a good or bad thing8230; On the one hand, we have schools warning pupils about the level and type of detail they add to their pages on social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace; we have the endless linking of dark crimes to membership of internet chatrooms; and perhaps the larger concern that online communication between individuals is substituting real-time, more collective, socialising.

I was talking recently to an artist, who said he felt that as 80 per cent of communication is non-verbal, you could build up a very strange and partial picture of humanity if you conducted your relationships over the keyboard. This is true, but then online communication and human contact should be parallel, not replicative, activities. The tone of a conversation is harder to modulate in text8230; Thus 8220;netiquette8221; ghastly term, along with its various smiley/sad icons has become a way of trying to temper this8230; The facility with which people can overcome social awkwardness online 8212; whether breaking the ice with a potential partner, or making verbal contact when you cannot speak, or arguing with passion or humour about issues with people you have never met but feel you know 8212; militates against the naysayers of online communication. There are multiple benefits to mediating relationships through a keyboard and screen. None of these positives should be forgotten when the bleaker stories of teenagers communing in suicide chatrooms or paedophiles lurking in social networks get greater prominence in the headlines.

Excerpted from an article in 8216;Guardian Unlimited8217;