Uh, hi.

I hadn’t even noticed that the iTunes flirting story got posted to Kottke, Lifehacker, et al. until my friendly neighborhood gwailo emailed me with the poignant observation: “the people [commenting on that post] don’t appear to have actually read the last part[,] do they?”

If you just found my site via one of those links: hi, my name’s al3x, and iTunes didn’t get me a date. It didn’t get me so much as a real life, flesh and blood, face-to-face conversation. The whole point of that post was that this supposedly “social” technology engendered nothing more than your typical detached chat room or IM conversation, even though both participants were no more than 15 feet away. Even the ever-so-slight cloak of anonymity inherent in virtual identity was enough to prevent a meaningful real-world social interaction. That was the point.

That’s just how it worked for me, though. Chatting via iTunes library title is a technique (a, uh, “lifehack” cough), and there’s always someone out there who can implement your technique better (ie, use it to get a date). Good luck to that enterprising soul.