Oct. 13 2009 - 5:04 pm | 32 views | 1 recommendation | 1 comment

What I really want to know about strangers’ sex lives (Or: How to improve IJustMadeLove.com)

By KASHMIR HILL

Last week, the media went crazy over IJustMadeLove.com, a Poland-based website designed to let those getting busy share the good news. Everyone from Perez Hilton to the Daily Beast to the London Telegraph to Mashable picked up on the story. The site carefully documents the media craze here.

Most journalists seem impressed by the idea of Google-mapping sex. Users can document the details of their love-making: the exact address, the positions, the orientation of those involved, whether it was indoors or outdoors, whether it was the first time, and whether a condom was used. While this might be interesting to public health statisticians, it’s really not doing much for the editor of the Not-So Private Parts.

I checked out the love-making in my neighborhood. There have been three couplings nearby: all man-woman, all inside apartments. Allegedly, there are some adventurous lovemakers in my area. One supposed couple in an apartment building near the East River celebrated Columbus Day with four different sexual positions last night.

I imagine most people who visited the site will do so just once. They’ve got a Twitter feed set up; despite the massive wave of attention last week – the site crashed multiple times from the Web traffic generated by the news articles – their Twitter account has just 1,000 followers. It appears that, like me, people were intrigued by the idea but disappointed by its execution.

Here’s how it could be better.

The first problem: there’s no verification process. To enter your lovemaking, you just click and enter your data. This means that 99% of the over 34,000 love-making sessions documented are probably the wishful thinking of 13-year-old boys across the world. To improve the site (and increase the delicious invasion of privacy), you should have to create an account and each of your sexual encounters should require a confirmation from a second person.

Instead of a post-coital cigarette, you could share your BlackBerry with your partner for the verification process. An added benefit for the Gmail-addicted would be having an excuse to check your e-mail while cuddling.

The second problem: there’s no identifying information or context. How old are these people? How did they meet? What do they do? It’s not all that exciting to know that a man and a woman had sex in an apartment building in the East Village, but if the little box included their ages, their professions, and how they got that person into bed with them, I might be more interested. It could also function as a learning tool. You might figure out the hot pick-up spot in your neighborhood. If a lot of “couples” result from Friday nights at Ace Bar, you’ll know where you should head to score this weekend.

The third problem: as they say in the Internet age, “Pictures or it didn’t happen.”