Total Members: 2 million in the Spring Street network.
Prospects online at review time: 956.
Cost
Credits: 25/$24.95 50/$39.95 100/$69.95.
Quality of Prospects
Ease of Use
Features & Extras
Nerve.com is a trendy sex-slanted webzine which offers photos, articles, fiction, essays and funky-sexy products like sex-position calendars, sex etiquette books and hip T-shirts. Their personals database stems out of the Spring Street Network, of which more below.
On Nerve, you pay for what you use. Other services bill monthly, but Nerve works on credits. It takes a credit to contact someone, but you can reply to a message received for free. Chatting also burns credits--fairly quickly, I might add--at a cost of 2 credits for 30 minutes, or 3 for 60.
Other features include a voicemessage feature and chatrooms. You can invite pre-meditated prospects to chat or just chat with whomever looks good and is online at the moment.
Nerve offers a quick search--the basic age, gender, location--as well as an advanced search based on the questions and criteria you choose, for example, people who want children too. All of these can include profiles with photos only or everyone.
The Spring Street Network, the source for the ads here, is a massive nationwide personals network which can be accessed from sites like VillageVoice.com, TheOnion.com, and several others, from mainstream magazines like the Boston Globe to websites like Disinfo.com (for conspiracy theorists) and Act For Love (personal site for activists). The ads are included in one big database, but you can make a search location-specific, and you can search for users who joined through a particular site, so you can find the more trendy folks like the Nervesters or only the folks in the area covered by a local paper. People who place ads in the Spring Street Network tend to be young and hip.
I interviewed A.D.J., a 35-year-old bi woman in AT looking for men. She says, "After I found nerve, I blew off Match.com. Match was what I would call 'muggle-rich:'lots of football fans, accountants, sales-marketing types and such who aren't really my shot of tequila. Nervelings are funnier, edgier."
She found Nerve "super easy to use." She notes that the site now has a voice-message feature. "Voice is a big part of attraction for me. I never knew this until I saw that I became significantly unattracted to one guy after meeting him and hearing his voice in person. Their 'Instant Gratifier' chat rooms are also a cool feature."
One suggestion of hers: "Ideally, they would have a full text search for those with more uhhh... obscure tastes...but they don't."
A.D.J. found the Spring Street profile questions less dry than on other services. "This is good for the first time user who isn't quite sure how to approach this new medium in mating. Some of the responses had me laughing out loud and I found myself making almost as many notes on new books to read as new folks to message."
A.D.J. says, "I'd rate the Spring Street prospects somewhere between 3.5 and 5, with some members being pretty damn hot. I've used Match.com and perused others, and found that Spring Street folks are, on average, the least boring. The sites seem to attract a more creative set. Web and graphics designers, scientists, grad students, humanities professors, activists, computer geeks, writers... Hell, I did a Brazilian I found through Nerve who was a 10 if ever there was one. Seven months after our first date, I'm still dating a very special man whom I met through Nerve.
