everyone's always talking about myspace and facebook but there are other places out there. I always figured more practice in different environments can only be a good thing. Especially if you're not trying to practice all aspects at once. like if it take 25 opens to get a conversation, then thats gonna be a lot of work to get it all right, like a pyramid, more work at the bottom. split the pyramid up and you can work on different aspects simultaneously.

http://www.myyearbook.com Myyearbook
Kind of like myspace but its got built in alternate communication methods, like giving gold stars and high-fives, but you can add a sentence, and the cheesiest flirts you've ever heard, and gifts and posting pics on their page, adding themselves as "groupies". A lot of ways of IOI'ing without actual communication. Females are really accessible on here due to the nature of their match system and It's way more friendly on here than myspace.

the matching system is simplistic but self-perpetuating. based purely on picture and a simple yes or no. the clever bit is when they say yes. you get a page with 9 pics and 5 guesses to pick the one who said yes. the really clever bit is your incorrect guesses count as yeses on those pics. I got about 2600 yes's on my pic before it tailed off.

Seems to me on FB you're generally practising on ones you'd want to get a date with. Why do that when you can practise on a whole world of females first. Ok so you wont get to meet them but if they're interested enough to suggest cam fun or give you an external IM address, you know you've done something right, cos you know they'll be getting offers of that all over the place, especially the hot ones and since you dont have to resort to traditional openers this is more practise for when you've got them into a conversation. And its easy enough to say you dont use IM if u havent got time to maintain 00s of global friends

social me app on facebook

this is good for 2 things. your picture gets rated with tags rather than numerical. there's a whole bunch of built in ones. like nice, hot,sexy,cute,great hairstyle etc. so like if you get loads of nice, you can be pretty sure you're not projecting the right thing. It's quite instructive as pictures that dont seem that great to me sometimes do a lot better (ie more hots and sexy) than others which I'd think were better. tagging tails off a while but you can get some more by changing your headline or pic and certain times of day are better than others.

tagging is an interesting challenge, think up a tag which gets a response by message rather than just a builtin thanks. this is like an journey into the female psyche.
so i discovered "more than just a pretty face I hope"

the stupid ones, didnt get it at all and generally just thanked me, people who wanted to be taken more seriously, were compelled to qualify themselves straight off in a message.

I used to practice openers here too cos you can see who's online and you get a response reasonably quick so you can have a lot of short conversations in a small amount of time. Most people dont even bother to look at the mini profiles to see if you're in the same country and a lot of people dont fill in the about me, interested in sections so I wouldnt either. that way your level of interest is pretty much down to words alone.

http://person.com person.com

pretty useless as a dating site but it's redeeming feature is a flirting game called play and flirt. what that is, is 3 girls and 4 guys ask a question of each other and you get a time limit to answer. and then everyone rates the answers and picks who they like best. so the challenge is to come up with a good answer under the pressure of a time limit and you get to see all the answers afterwards.

so a lot of the questions are gonna be pretty lame but it's still brain training for coming up with stuff off the top of your head, thinking outside the box etc. handling curve balls on IM is really a similar kind of thing.