Wesleyan students have long spent idle moments clicking through profiles on Wesmatch. Over 1,800 of them have been back on the site this year alone.
Now, this procrastination and stalking tool is going national.
A month ago, Williams College became the first school to license the Wesmatch technology, which asks members to fill out a questionnaire and then ranks their compatibilities with other students at the school.
Ephmatch.com, Williams’ equivalent, was the result and has been a hit on the Williamstown, MA campus. So-named after the Williams mascot, the Ephs, the link to Williams on Wesmatch reads “It’s about Ephing time.”
And Williams is just the first of many schools to be added.
“We’re seriously talking to mostly other small liberal arts college and a few other large ones,” said Dan Stillman ’04, who, along with Matt Eaton ’04, created Wesmatch.
The Wesmatch Network, as they now call all the sites based on their technology, is not connected to the University. Up until now, Stillman and Eaton have funded the site out of pocket.
“The cost has been fairly minimal,” they wrote in a joint email. “The cost scales up pretty quickly when the site becomes less of a one-school hobby and more of a massive network for thousands of users.” Williams is reportedly paying $1000 to use the technology for the semester.
Drew Newman, a Williams senior who heads an entertainment organization called All Campus Entertainment was responsible for bringing Ephmatch to Williams and says the site has been popular there.
“Within 3 days, over 1,000 students signed up,” he said. “And at the moment 85% of the student body has registered.” The media has also taken note with stories on local TV channels and in the Boston Globe.
He concedes, however, that few have actually gone on dates as a result of the service.
There are many websites for dating or meeting friends—Friendster, the six-degrees of separation friend and dating service, has been almost as big a hit at Wesleyan as Wesmatch has. But Stillman and Eaton say they have an edge.
“Wesmatch is somewhat unique in that it attempts to tell people the 15 or so people in the entire school with whom they are most compatible,” they wrote. Asked whether they’d ever merge with Friendster if given the opportunity, they said to ask again when Friendster comes knocking on their door.
There is something peculiar about the simultaneous popularity of Wesmatch and the often-cited anti-dating culture at Wesleyan and, as the Globe pointed out, at Williams too.
“We’ve definitely sensed a hesitancy in the community to date, so we’ve been adding features such as Matchlink to foster an attitude of, basically, ‘Hey, why the hell not?’” Stillman and Eaton wrote.
Wesmatch’s novelty may have ebbed a bit. And it seems to have already done the same at Williams.
“It was definitely a novelty,” said Dominique Mack, a Williams freshman who has a profile on Ephmatch.com. “When it first came out, everyone was doing it and everyone was talking about it. Now it’s not even considered anymore.”
Whether Wesmatch-based sites will stay relevant once the initial onslaught of interest wanes is a challenge for its creators. However, they are optimistic and have seen success on this campus.
They wrote, “It’s hard to quantify, but we do hear all the time about people who run into others on campus and have ‘WesMatch Moments’,” the creators’ term for that moment of realization when a student remembers seeing a person’s name on the site.
Newman can see a day when those moments go beyond the confines of each school’s campus.
“If there is a campus-wide Wesleyan student organization that would be interested in sponsoring some sort of inter-campus social mixer, we would definitely be interested,” he said.
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