Cloud Girlfriend, the new dating site for liars and imposters, is a hit

You know how you're always complaining about how there's just too much honesty and candor in the dating scene, how you wish you could finally meet that one guy who's willing to mislead you into loving him, if he's even out there at all? Well, David Fuhriman heard your grievances and has responded by launching Cloud Girlfriend, the new dating site that encourages users to employ fictitious names, bios, and profile pictures. We warned you about this back in March but didn't take it too seriously, as we were pretty sure it wouldn't really take off. 

Yet off it took, bolstered by an ample amount of press coverage. The trend-loving New York Times — which itself frequently defends the benefits of anonymity, what with its thousands (or tens!) of unnamed sources — sounds kind of supportive when it notes that because users are expected to hide behind artifices, they can "receive the emotional benefit of sweet talk without actually being in a relationship." 

The concept is simple, if unorthodox: Users build fantasy profiles by selecting a photo from a bevy of attractive people and creating a fictitious biography and name. A series of simplistic either-or questions (Books or Movies?) shapes a personality and matches it with other fantasy profiles.

If the match agrees to “date,” they can start sending messages to each other. From there, the relationship can remain a fantasy; or, if the users decide to reveal their true selves, it can progress or die.

Ah, yes, we still get tingles when we reminisce about that first time we said to our sweetheart, "Reveal your true self!" But it turns out that Fuhriman's Second Life-y idea was the result of something less sweet than bitter; his original concept was more of a service-type thing that, says the Times, "would have created fake Facebook accounts of ideal girlfriends or boyfriends (say, a model who saves endangered species) to post messages to one’s Facebook wall." (This, by the way, was the version that we'd predicted wouldn't last, so we guess we were kind of right anyway. No big deal.)

"Jim"!