Interesting statistic. My wife and I go back a bit further than last year ... 1999 ... but you can count us among the couples who feel blessed by the Internet. neither one of us were looking, in fact I was in the final stages of a pretty bitter divorce (don't let anyone kid you, there is no other kind) and one day I made a chat buddy and the rest is history. If anything I would say that the statistic you quoted is perhaps conservative, because many people still feel there's a stigma attached to on-line meetings and are not always forthright about admitting it.

I think he's been mentioned here before but Markus Frind in Canada runs one of the more profitable web sites in the world ... 20 million plus page views per day, all from his living room with no full-time employees ... and people meeting people is his only service. Certainly an interesting market segment, and with the right attitude and dynamics you can be performing a good service as well.

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Definitely an interesting video. I was expecting the ending to be some advert by some American technology company stating how they are the future.

Such a barrage of statistics. Unnecessarily overwhelming, I find.

Im not necessarily a glass half empty guy, but I wonder how many married couples have split up because of the Internet? I'd guess it to be high. My expeience is that addiction to chatrooms, instant messaging, gambling sites, etc, are having a seriously detrimental effect on society.

Even kids prefer to sit at a screen to interact with their friends than to put on a coat and go meet them. I think that is unhealthy.

Commerce may be benefitting from going online. I really don't think that, long term, human relationships will (current company excluded of course).