'Adventurous' dating through CrazyBlindDate.com

By Caroline McCarthy – November 6, 2007 7:18 AM PST

"Sometimes you just want to go out immediately, with reckless abandon."

So says the front page of CrazyBlindDate.com, which aims to get people together on sporadic blind dates with very little notice. The site--whose creators also are responsible for OKCupid.com--was soft-launched in Austin awhile back and officially entered a beta phase on Tuesday with new urban centers in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. The interface is sleek, and the concept is cool, but with this kind of thing it's really all about the people who use it.

Short version: You fill out a bunch of forms, get alerted, and then go on a date with someone whose photo you've never seen. (Eek!)

Longer version: CrazyBlindDate is pretty methodical. You select your city, tell the site whether you'd like to go on a solo date or double date and narrow down the times and neighborhoods that work for you. The site then asks you how much notice you need pre-date. I live in New York, and CrazyBlindDate was even courteous enough to ask me if I were an NYU or Columbia student who wanted to be set up with a fellow student. (They require a university e-mail address to confirm.)

Then you get to be picky, selecting preferred age ranges, ethnicities, heights, body types, and education levels (Grey's Anatomy freaks, you can choose to go on a date with someone who has a med school degree!) If you're too picky, a little alert box will pop up and say you might want to loosen up. But come on, really, I wasn't being that finicky by requesting an athletic guy under 35 who's over 6'1", has a graduate degree, and could meet me in Tribeca, right?

Let's face it: This site is going to get used by a whole lot of lonely people who want to get some tail (and by Grey's fans who want to go on dates with cute doctors).

Fortunately for CrazyBlindDate, there are a whole lot of people who fit that description. I smell a successful dot-com brewing.