When Dianna Hank first met
Noah Zitsman (a.k.a. “Noze”), he
was a black bear with red eyes and
antennae. She was “Dianna_2ns,”
a pink monkey nodding her head
to the twangs of an electric
guitar in the Phish “room”
on Turntable.fm, a musicstreaming site that lets users
take turns DJ-ing to an audience
of animated avatars.
A fan of the band Phish, Hank,
a 23 year-old Brooklynite who
works at a tech startup, spends
hours a day on Turntable while
she’s at the office, listening to
music and messaging with other
Phisheads in a public chatroom.
During one of these online exchanges last fall, Hank and Zitsman, discovered they’d both be at
the band’s upcoming gig in Vermont. So why not meet up?
They saw each other briefly at
the show, then at another concert
in New York the following month
and, another month after that, officially started dating. A year later,
they’re still together.
“With dating sites, when you
message people back and forth,
you’re very much crafting the
message,” says Hank, who once
tried unsuccessfully to find Mr.
Right with an online dating service. But on Turntable, “you’re
not editing yourself as much…
You’re just being you.”