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Take Anjana Arunachalam and Krishna Sundaresan, who married last August. In 2006, their common buddy Hari told Anjana that Krishna had an interesting blog she should check out, and warned Krishna to “not be nasty” if she left a comment. And so it began. A common love for Lord of the Rings (though she prefers the book and he the movie) got them started off, but pretty soon, their comment-conversations had nothing to do with the contents of his blog at all.

“I couldn’t send emails from work, so comments on his blog were the only way for us to chat during the day,” recalls Anjana, a software engineer.

In about three months, the chats moved to the telephone. And in another three, they met for the first time in Hyderabad, where Anjana was staying.

“He arrived from Chennai at one a.m. and was quite insulted that I was fast asleep,” says Anjana laughing. But after that, things happened so fast, “It was scary”. Within a month, they’d decided they wanted to be married, and another month later, were officially engaged.

Strangely, since then, the two have found that they have several common relatives and acquaintances. “Looks like we would have met at some point anyway,” says Krishna, who’s in equity research. “It just happened to be through Hari and my blog.” Well, Hari got a free ‘thank you’ dinner out of it, but the blog didn’t fare as well. “I’ve taken it down—it got too much publicity among parents and relatives after the marriage!” laughs Krishna.

For Meenakshi (Meens) Thirukode and Prem Gopalakrishnan who tied the knot this January, Orkut and Spanish film director Alejandro Gonzales played Cupid. Shortly after joining the website, Meens was browsing through profiles looking for people she knew, and came across an interesting stranger on her friend Amrita’s friends list.

“I found we were both from Chennai and that we both liked movies by Gonzales,” says Meens. “So having assured myself that he wasn’t an axe-murderer or something, I made my move. It was like meeting at a party—only it happened to be online.”

Things hotted up very quickly between the pair—just a week of messages and phone calls later, Prem had decided that Meens was the one and had asked her out, and at the end of a month, Meens had told mom and dad about him. All without ever having met him in person.

“We often look back and wonder how it all happened in a week,” muses Meens.

But since Prem was working as a software engineer in New Jersey and Meens in the arts in India, it was only after a long-distance relationship of about a year that the two met for their first ‘date’— in a Pizza Hut in Bangalore.

“Meens seemed perfectly comfortable, but it took me a little while,” admits Prem. “Seeing a person I’d come to know intimately for the first time was a strange feeling, but she was exactly how I thought she would be, and my anxieties soon subsided.”

For Prashant Soundarajan and Kalpana Mani, on the other hand, the meeting happened first— twenty-odd years ago, actually, when the two went to Kindergarten together. But then their families moved to different cities, and they lost touch until five years ago.

“I was in Boston, working as a finance professional, when I got a call from my mother asking if I remembered Kalpana,” says Prashant. Turned out, she was in Boston too, studying radiology, and Prashant was quick to ward off any matchmaking schemes mom might have. “I told her, ‘I know where you’re going with this, and the answer is absolutely not!’”

But fate had other plans. “One night, my friend and I were surfing Friendster, and I don’t really know why, but I typed in ‘Prashant’ and ‘Boston’ just to see what would happen,” says Kalpana.

Sure enough, her Kindergarten buddy’s profile popped up, but Kalpana felt too shy to leave him a message.

That would have been that, except that Prashant saw her profile in his ‘Who’s viewed me’ section and decided to send her a message instead and the two began to exchange emails. The following Friday night, they decided to meet.

“I got there first and kept my eye on the front door in anticipation of Kalpana arriving,” recalls Prashant. “When she did, the first thought that crossed my mind was ‘Whoa! I think I may need to date this girl!’” And the rest, as they say, is history—the couple was married in November last year.

It’s really the age-old story of boy-meets-girl, but with a cyber twist — instead of their eyes meeting across a crowded room, they chance upon each other’s online profiles or blogs and are smitten.

But one thing’s for sure; when it comes to matchmaking, these social networking sites could give matrimonial websites a run for their money!

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