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DateMySchool is an online dating platform for students and alumni that offers privacy control and safety features. It permits only verified students and alumni to join and enables members to restrict schools, departments, individuals and other groups from accessing their profiles. The site does not index profiles on Google. DateMySchool won About.com's 2012 Readers' Choice Awards for Best College Dating Site and Best Free Dating Site.

History
DateMySchool was co-founded by Columbia University M.B.A. students, Balazs Alexa and Jean Meyer, in November 2010 after a woman in the School of Social Work complained that there were too few men in her department. Alexa and Meyer created the site to help busy students and alumni safely discover new people across departments and on campuses nearby. Within the first week of its launch, 5% of Columbia University's student population registered for the site.

DateMySchool first expanded to NYU, University of California, Berkely, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, and then spread to 350 schools before launching to more than 1,000 schools nationwide. The website is now the largest dating site for college students in the United States.

Product: A Reversed Social Network
DateMySchool calls itself a "reverse social network" (RSN) because all users are verified and can only see and be seen by people they don’t know but can trust. The site claims to be the first RSN and prioritizes safety, privacy and efficiency.

Safety
DateMySchool claims its success stems from its safety. It requires students to register with their active university email addresses, protects the site against fake profiles, and lets members control who may access their profiles: members filter through schools, departments, location, age range, and personal attributes to compliment their preferences.

According to Pew Internet, 66% of Internet users think online dating is dangerous because users are dishonest in their profiles. As their value proposition is to prioritize safety, DateMySchool authenticates each user upon registration, ensuring that one email identifies one person, and users may report other members. The site offers safety tips for online and offline activities and their customer service response time is within 24 hours.

Privacy
DateMySchool members may exclude schools, departments and individuals to ensure they remain anonymous on campus and only discover new people on DateMySchool. By default, members will not be seen by their classmates as they are invisible to their department and their department is invisible to them. However, they may change their privacy settings to allow members from their department to see them. Alexa and Meyer claim that by enabling users to choose who can and cannot view their profiles, DateMySchool minimizes online dating's stigma of embarrassment.

According to Pew Internet, 29% of Internet users believe there is a stigma with online dating. DateMySchool believes this stigma is generated by the anxiety that users will be discovered by friends and family online. Thus, the site claims that their privacy settings diminish this stigma.

Efficiency
DateMySchool claims that its members frequently set up offline dates within the same day they register for the site, and that they are responsible for more than half of the dates at some schools. The company credits its efficiency to its safety and privacy features and the basic trust amongst its users: as members either attend the same school or a nearby school, there's an initial bond over their proximity and common educational backgrounds, values and goals.

According to Pew Internet, 53% of Internet users think online dating is inefficient. DateMySchool claims it takes weeks on other dating sites to organize offline dates because those sites have a lack of security, privacy and trust.

Features
DateMySchool offers various communication modes. Users may send private messages, chat instantly, and post on an interactive message board, where they may also comment and star each others’ statuses. This message board allows members to communicate with other users instantly, without befriending them like on Facebook. Members may also view, save and block profiles, search by schools, departments, and age range, and engage in a Q & A section, where they may respond to personal questions and compare answers with other users.

Premium features include private browsing and saving, more search options, and other abilities, including changing usernames, turning instant messaging off, viewing photos in their original size, and receiving notifications when their sent messages have been read.