| Insider Secrets: Yahoo | |
| September 2000• Vol.8 Issue 9 |
|
Personals Find People Online |
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[
PERSONALS
] 
You’ve done chat rooms. Sure, they’re anonymous and easy, but the
spam, harassment, flaming, and general ego wars get old fast. You’ve
also done newspaper personals
, those acronym-laden descriptive pick-up paragraphs that litter the
daily paper. There is certainly a more leisurely way to pour over
dating prospects, but you wish there was a longer evaluation period
between dropping a letter to her personal mailbox and meeting for
cappuccino with the ad placer and her mom.Welcome to Yahoo! Personals. Combining the ease and anonymity of chat rooms with the screening of newspaper personals, Yahoo! Personals adds several million users to your prospective dating pool. It’s not just a dating service, however. Yahoo! lets you search for people based on a wide range of categories so you can find a pitcher for your softball team, a pen pal, or a soul mate, all from the anonymous comfort of your computer room. If you can’t find who your are looking for in the posted ads, post your own ad; maybe Mr. or Ms. Right is out there looking for you. ( NOTE: Yahoo! Personals is only for a mature audience. The content in many of the messages is not appropriate for children, and it may be offensive to some adults.) 
Getting Started. To
begin, you may just want to browse the listings. You can do so at
any time you want without having to be a Yahoo! member. However, in
order to post or respond to ads, you’ll need to register with the site.
You can easily do this by clicking the Sign In link on the Yahoo!
Personals home page (http://personals.yahoo.com/
). Once you are a registered user, you can also play with many of
the other Yahoo! toys, including Messenger, the games section, and
more.The Personals home page is Grand Central Station for personals activity on Yahoo!. Along the top of the Yahoo! Personals page are often-used links, such as those for posting and keeping track of ads, signing in and out, and accessing your Personals Mailbox. Along the left margin are a host of Inside Personals options. Many of these, including Personals Mailbox, My Ads, and Post An Ad, are mirrors of the links at the top of the page. You also get handy links to a Getting Started section (tutorials), as well as Success Stories, which are “aw gosh” testimonials to the effectiveness of looking for love online.
The main section of the screen includes links to Expert Advice from the likes of Dr. John Gray and Dr. Drew, the Yahoo! Personals Success Story of the day, and a poll. However, the meat of the Personals section is at the top, in the form of relationship types you can browse by and a Search field.
Finding Personals.
As mentioned, people use Yahoo! Personals for different purposes,
and one of the best ways to zero in on what you’re looking for is
with the Browse options on the Personals home page. First, decide what
you’re looking for. Do you want a long-term relationship or something
shorter? Maybe you are more interested in a pen pal or a person to
go bowling with. Within these categories, you can also narrow you
search to male or female. If you are just looking for a friend, you
can browse all relationship and preference types at once.Clicking one of these preference links brings you to the next page, where you enter a city, state, or ZIP code to browse a specific area. Once you enter the correct information, press ENTER to go to the listings page. If you’ve done searches before, Yahoo! will skip the entry page, and you’ll be brought right to the listings section. Listings are arranged by date and consist of the person’s age, location, nickname, and message. You can easily narrow in on parameters that are more specific by using the menu on the left side of the screen to select ethnicity, religion, or a narrower (or wider) location area.
If you have specific criteria you are looking for in a person (maybe you are looking for a Beach Boys fan), you can use the search box on the Personals home page. Just enter your search term (“Beach Boys”) and click the search button. This will bring you again to the listings screen, where all relevant ads will be waiting. One last thing about this listings page: As you browse through the listings, you may occasionally see a little smiley face icon next to an ad. This icon lets you know the person who placed the ad is presently online, which means you can send this person an instant message if you have Yahoo! Messenger installed on your system. If the smiley face is grayed out, it means that person is not online. The little smiley icon also gives you easy access to the Yahoo! Member Directory listing for the poster. By clicking the icon, you can get that member’s profile (alternately, go to http://members.yahoo.com/ and search for the person’s ID), which may contain information that will help you decide whether you want to respond to a particular ad.
Tracking Ads. Email
Alerts and Clipped Ads are a couple of different tools that can help
you find and track ads that interest you. You can access both of these
from the left menu on the Personals home page or at the top of the
page. Using Personals Alerts, you can instruct Yahoo! Personals to keep an eye out for ads you’re interested in and e-mail you once or twice a day with what it finds. You can set alert criteria and the frequency you want to receive them in the Alerts section. The Clipping tool lets you easily store ads that interest you in one convenient place so you can pour over them and respond at your leisure. Saving ads to this area is as easy as clicking the Clip This Ad link on individual ads. The My Clipped Ads section lists all your ads, and you can view one by clicking it or delete it by clicking its trashcan icon.
Posting Ads. Once
you become tired of searching other ads, you may find what you’re
looking for much more quickly by placing your own ad. By clicking
one of the Post An Ad links from the Personals home page, you can create
you own ad that will appear live in 24 hours and stay live for 30
days. ( NOTE: You must be a registered user who is at least 18
years old to post ads.)The ad creation page itself features many optional and required fields (asterisks mark the required fields), letting people know your relative location, screen name, gender, preferences, and more. Many of these are optional, and even when you must make a selection, such as under Education or Religion, you are given a Prefer Not To Say choice. You actually compose your ad in a field at the bottom of the page. You should give a bit of thought to what you want to say. Take time to either browse through existing ads to see how other others are doing it or read Yahoo!’s Writing Tips section, where you’ll get advice such as use humor and don’t lie. Writing Tips features Do’s and Don’ts, as well as examples of successful ads, both of which can come in handy when you sit down to compose your own ad. (You can find the Writing Tips section either on the Personals home page under Cool And Helpful or by clicking the link next to the ad text box on the Post An Ad page.)
Responses. You post
your ad, it goes live, and then the responses start rolling in. You
can access all incoming messages in your Personals Mailbox, which
you can open from the Yahoo! Personals home page. With your Personals
Mailbox, you can store up to 100 messages using multiple Yahoo! identities.
In addition to reading messages here, you also can set the mailbox
up to alert you when you get new messages and create and edit identities.
Clicking a received message lets you read it; clicking the sender
lets you see his or her profile.It’s important to remember that your Personals Mailbox is not like a regular e-mail mailbox. Everything is anonymous until you decide to make it more “public” by giving out your e-mail address or other information. You’ll also make it more public if you click an e-mail address in the replier’s message, for doing so will give that person your e-mail address. There is no sent folder for the mailbox, so always keep copies of any responses you send on your hard drive. In addition, once you delete messages, they are gone for good.
Be Careful Out There.
Although Yahoo! goes to great lengths to establish an environment
that is as safe as possible, this is the Internet, and you just can
never really be sure who you’re dealing with. The Dating Tips section
(located on the Personals home page under the Cool And Helpful section)
should be one of your first stops before beginning any sort of a dialog
with another user. Included here are not only great tips on how to
safeguard yourself online but also how to manage the first face-to-face
meeting. This is a valuable section, and it should help ensure your
experiences with this service are both personally happy and personally
secure. by Rich Gray |
