Across the globe, Ireland ranks as the No 1 for searches on the keyword ‘lonely’, and to reflect this Rehab’s New Media Lottery Services has launched a social networking site www.lonely.ie to provide a forum for lonely hearts to meet and widen their social network.
New Media Lottery Services is the organisation behind Rehab Bingo Online.
Aimed at over 25s, marketing manager Irene Gahan says the site offers the chance for people to widen their social circle in a relaxed and fun online environment that provides the possibility of finding another special lonely heart.
She says that unlike the usual dating sites, Lonely.ie concentrates on enabling both new and existing friends to keep in touch. Users upload their profile in a secure and private setting, viewed only by other users that have been accepted as friends.
“Meeting strangers in a bar or a club is hard,” says Gahan. “It’s a lot easier to meet like-minded people in a secure online environment than taking a chance of meeting someone special in a crowded pub.
“Nowadays our busy lives mean that we don’t have the time to filter through prospective boyfriends and girlfriends in person, time is a commodity a lot of us don’t have. Using a website to meet people means that we could potentially court a number of people at a time, a huge advantage to busy professionals.
“Lonely.ie will ease the pressure of meeting new people in clubs and pubs and create a fun online environment for people to widen their social network,” Gahan added.
Lonely.ie was created following findings by the new service Google Trends which works out how many searches have been done via the internet search engine on particular terms.
Google Trends discovered that ‘lonely’ was the word entered most frequently by internet users in Ireland. Other countries that have recorded similar statistics include Melbourne, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand.
In addition to the features typical to social networking sites such as uploading photo albums, online space to write about yourself, Lonely.ie allows users to find other users through various categories, such as free to date, attached, looking for friendship and many more.
The site gives the Irish people a chance to share their dating woes and to get some tips from other members and dating experts. Each month a singleton is chosen who is thought to have had the worst dating disaster, winning €500 for his or her story.
Lonely.ie will also regularly give free tickets to gigs, cinema and the theatre and the resident expert Cameron Cruise will dish out his monthly ‘What Women Want’ column. Movie reviews, book reviews and much more will also be regularly updated in the ‘Lonely Loves’ section on the site.
By John Kennedy
