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SAN FRANCISCO — Ggreg Taylor, a party and nightclub promoter, has countless friends — making him one of San Francisco's best-networked guys. 'When I throw a party, 1,000 people come,' he says. So Taylor, 37, doubted he'd meet anyone new last summer when he joined Friendster, a hot new online dating and friendship site. He was wrong. Trolling through hundreds of listings two months ago, he met Donald Russi, 43, another single gay man in San Francisco. They've been dating since. Friendster joins a fast-growing list of social-networking Web sites leveraging new technologies to solve an old problem: connecting for romance or business. The new ventures differ from traditional dating sites such as Match and Yahoo Personals. Users create searchable networks of friends and co-workers. The idea: People have better luck finding dates or business contacts among friends — and their friends' friends. Such beefed-up search technologies boost traffic on the sites — and hold visitors' attention longer than traditional dating sites, says Nielsen/NetRatings. Friendster users spent nearly two hours on the site in October vs. 35 minutes for Yahoo Personals and 55 minutes for Match, Nielsen says. Millions flocked to the new ventures in the past year, generating buzz and bucks from venture capital firms and other investors. Friendster just landed $13 million from blue-chip VC firms Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar invested 'several million dollars' in Meetup in October, a company spokesman says. But despite soaring popularity, the ventures face potential landmines, say e-commerce experts and investors. Competition is keen as more get launched. Internet giant America Online is about to launch — a personals site using its AOL Instant Messenger service. Established sites such as Match still have three times as much traffic as Friendster, Nielsen says. What's more, many start-ups have little or no revenue. Some, such as
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