Getting to Know You

Users can rate other people online under the categories of commerce (say, a seller on eBay) , community (a voice on a Yahoo message board), gaming (a player of Ultima Online) or dating. Aside from writing an opinion, they're also asked to rank certain qualities on a standard 1-to-5 scale. Under "dating," for example, you'll be asked about honesty, helpfulness and "skill," among others. The results are then turned into percentages and cheery graphs.

But there's no rubbernecking here: To look someone up, "you need to know them -- at least their username and the Web site they're on," says Cho. "This is not 'hot or not'; we want this information to have value. We imagine people coming here with a very specific agenda."

For the most part, Opinity avoids the subjectiveness that devils other sites. Because it's clear that, in the land of online love, the difference between honesty and etiquette is sometimes perilously unclear. People get flamed for refusing second dates, not returning phone calls or -- in one notably clueless example -- not returning a Wink, the automated e-mail that Match allows a user to send in lieu of a personal message.

Frani Levinson, a Reseda, Calif., beauty clinic owner, went on Truedater shortly after the site was launched, looking for some of the 40 men she has dated over the last two years.

A lot of postings, she says, seemed to fall in a certain category: "He didn't like her or she didn't like him and then he goes on the site and ends up ruining her," she says. "And she could be a cool person. You don't know who you can trust."

Backing Geller's assertion that "the users feel invested in the site," Levinson, 44, has clear ideas about what is and isn't acceptable. Last year, she says, she dated a man who stopped calling her after she walked in on him cross-dressing.

"But I wouldn't post that, because I wouldn't want to expose him," she says. It would have to be, she says, that someone was blatantly dishonest with her.

She pauses.

"But then, I lie about my age, so who am I to judge?"