The Pakistani Spectator

By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen “Parisian Love,” the Google Search ad that was run during the Super Bowl. Love, it seems, is in the air at Google. And to capitalize on that, the startup GoodCrush has created a new feature: GoogleCrush.

Here’s how it works: if you work at Google and have a @google.com email address, you simply enter your name and that email address, and then enter the email address of up to 5 other people that work at Google that you have a crush on. If one of those people also enters you as one of their crushes, you’ll be connected. If the person you added as a crush doesn’t add you back, your name will remain anonymous.

This timely and humorous addition is simply an extension of GoodCrush, the service which does the same thing as I described above but for college campuses. For it to work, the sender and recipient have to have the same .edu email address. Since its launch last Monday, GoodCrush is available for a couple dozen colleges around the U.S., there are around 6,000 registered users, and some 18,500 crush emails have been sent.

“The ‘CrushFinder’ that you see on the homepage is based on a project that I ran while serving as VP and President of the Undergraduate Student Government at Princeton, we got around 30% of the student body in 24 hours both years,” co-founder Josh Weinstein tells us. “What is unique and exciting about GoodCrush is that it focuses on dense and insulated social networks – college campuses – and we require users to register with their school’s .edu email address. Google’s campuses have the same characteristics as college campuses – so we hope to see the ensuing excitement that comes from GoogleCrush,” he continues.

Cute. And in case you forgot, Sunday is Valentine’s Day, so this is potentially useful if you’re a college kid (or Googler) without a date this weekend. Get on it.

GoodCrush works out of the Dogpatch Labs in New York — the startup workspace affectionately known as the “frat house for geeks.” The company was seed funded by FirstMark.

Source: TechCrunch