Pimp Your Ride

by Elizabeth

Calling all Harley girls: If you fantasize about riding off into the sunset on the back of a bicycle made for two, Bikerkiss.com, a niche online dating community for motorcycle enthusiasts, may help you make your dreams come true.

Bikerkiss members need not own a motorcycle to join this community which spans the states, UK, Canada, Australia and Europe. Whether you’re looking for a ride or someone to ride with, you can search for matches based on the brand of bike they own. (There are also conventional search fields such as location, age, and so forth.)

While the site is reported to be the first and the largest community for single bikers, only eleven members were online (including this biker-blogger…okay, just blogger) at 4:30p.m. on a Monday afternoon.

The sparseness of the active community may result from a poorly organized site, clearly victim to large discrepancies in logic. (Perhaps neglect from the site’s parent company, Successfulmatch.com– which hosts over 30 other niche online dating sites– is to blame.) A link to the bland homepage sits on the far right of the navigation bar, and directions for how to be the model of the month are more visible than the actual model of the month –which, coincidentally, took me about a month to find. In short, no matter what you’re looking for, assume it’ll be hard to find.

When you do find a member of interest, you can send a wink—a.k.a. an icebreaker such as “I’m interested in you!” or even “I am not a gold member at this moment. Please email me so I can respond”—for free. Replying to e-mail/chats, adding 10 profile photos, browsing profiles and contributing to forums is also free for guests.