Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Chinese Flock to Virtual Apartments for Dating

by Amar Toor on October 13, 2009 at 07:30 AM

As any seasoned city-dweller knows, personal living space is valued at a premium. And as any warm-blooded human being knows, finding true love can present an even more harrowing task than locating a decent Manhattan sublet. Finding both? Crazy talk. The world's most populous country is no exception to this universal struggle. With over 1.3 billion people, China and its urban centers are becoming increasingly crowded, complicating the already thorny search for love and stability. A new site for young Chinese singles, though, purports to make the search for domestic bliss a bit easier.

iPartment, the latest teenage online craze in China, is a social networking, gaming, and online dating site where users create their own virtual apartment (with pets, gardens, and games) and then spend their time looking for someone else to share it with. The idea is pretty simple: use the appeal of online accessorizing and homemaking to attract a bunch of young, single girls to the site, convince the guys that if they want to have a chance with the ladies, they'd better join, too... and voilà.

The site has exploded recently, especially among 18 to 25-year-old singles who are looking for a simulation of what it means to share a life with somebody. A 23-year-old female student at Shanghai University told China Daily that if her relationship with her iPartment boyfriend gets serious, she just "might go out and see him someday."

Started in 2003 in Taiwan, iPartment (or "Love Apartment" in Chinese) now has over 20 million users, and continues to grow. With surging revenue coming from advertising like Starbucks, Dior, and Estée Lauder, and micropayments and VIP memberships, the site appears to be successfully converting social networking into serious profit. It may also be coming to a Facebook mini feed near you, as there is speculation that iPartment might follow in the footsteps of the Chinese game "Happy Farm," which spawned the wildly popular Facebook application "FarmVille."

The chances of iPartment attaining such lofty, FarmVille-like heights of widespread popularity in the US are still unlikely. The universal appeal of milking digital cows and harvesting corn is pretty self-evident and a breath of fresh air for city-dwellers, but virtual cohabitation? Not so much. [From: PSFK, via CNReviews]

Tags: china, dating, love, romance, top, virtual apartments, VirtualApartments

Comments

1

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular