The biggest surveillance screen in Latin America spans 860 square feet in a new building called the Ops Center that most residents of Rio de Janeiro don’t even know exists.

860 square feet of surveillance overlooking 70 municipal heads of government.

Evacuation teams at Mangueira community near Maracana Stadium.

Conversations and firemen at the Mangueira community evacuation drill.

photo credit: Philip Toledano for NYMag

In May, I wrote about new book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the exhaustive offspring of two neuroscientists and the largest pile of sex-related data on the planet, my Forbes.com column in a piece called The Internet is for Porn (so let’s talk about it).

Then I had the fortune of meeting Ogi Ogas, one of the book’s co-authors, and asked him a question that I’ve always wanted to know….

How much of the internet is actually for porn?

And how would you even measure such a thing?

In my follow-up, How Much of the Internet is Actually for Porn?, Dr. Ogas  gives us a (partial) answer to the question (for now) and points to some frameworks to think about the question, like different kinds of data you can look at (web searches, downloads, time spent on websites).

He also tells us the most popular adult site on the planet, a webcam site called LiveJasmin that 2.5% of the entire internet population visits a month (hotly contested by PornHub’s official Twitter handle).

I wasn’t the only curious one. This story rose to the #5 spot on Forbes.com for two days in September, got picked up in Reddit, AllThingsD, TechMeme, BusinessInsider and Men’s Health Magazine, crossed 60,000 views and  inspired a commentary on Gizmodo.

Check out Universe of Desire, an exhibition inspired by A Billion Wicked Thoughts, on display at the New York Museum of Sex February 8 – November 4, 2012.

(photo credit: Philip Toledano for NYMag, “He’s just not that into anyone“)

Despite the undeniable fact that the social era has arrived — mutual friends, followers, first-degree connections, APIs — the dating sites wallow in primordial username soup (so that’s where you’ve been hiding, nycprince03!) and refuse to hook up to the social graph.

The result? An antisocial network.

Instead of connecting with people you know, you set up a username to mask your identity, hope no one you know sees you, and spend the whole time filtering. Age. Location. Income.

Some members make it through to the date filter, then you filter them out, and if you’re lucky you find a mate and get the hell off the site.

So dating sites grow the only way they can by paying to acquire you, so you can pay them (a subscription!) to spend your time avoiding people you don’t know, hoping to find your match.

Otherwise sensible filtering criteria, like who you know in common, is not possible in a world of usernames, so you’re left with “10 miles from 10005″ and mysterious matchmaking algorithms.

Usernames are why dating sites can’t grow on their own, like social networks. They have to grow in spite of themselves. By advertising!

One correction that one online dating executive pointed out to me:

“Advertising-based category” is code for “also pays to acquire users,” “does not grow organically” and “not a social network.”

“Advertising-based category” means ad-supported, meaning  dating companies that make revenue from running ads on their site (versus making money on member subscriptions). OKCupid, which is a free site, is considered among traditional dating industry players a success at growing without advertising, organically if you will.

I still stand by my broader assertion – that dating sites that can’t come to grips with the social graph will eventually be left in the dust.

Jezebel, one of my favorite blogs, picked up my piece and focuses on this social graph/anonymity debate, asking: Would you date online if it wasn’t anonymous?

When you think about it, anonymity in online dating actually is kind of weird. When you meet someone at a party or a bar, one of the first things you tell them is your name. And yet online, daters routinely withhold this information, disclosing seemingly more personal things like their income and desire for children first. There are good reasons for this — your dating site profile is potentially accessible to way more people than you might meet in a bar, and so arguably the risk of stalking and abuse goes up. But some of the reasons online dating remains anonymous likely have to do with stigma. The online space is seen as scarier than the real world, even though, unfortunately, daters face risks from people they meet at bars and parties too. And online dating itself still gets portrayed as slightly suspect, even as more and more people try it. Not everyone is comfortable publicly declaring that they’re dating online — and using one’s real name on a dating site would be, in a lot of ways, such a declaration.

Read the full post in AdAge.

And if you are feeling nostalgic, read this 2003 BusinessWeek gem, A Dud in Cupid’s Online Quiver? from 2003:

Friendster may be the hottest dot.com to show up since Google. Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Abrams started Friendster.com as a way of making it easier to meet friends of friends and avoid the “creepy” feeling he associated with online dating — and his concept quickly caught fire. Abrams hasn’t spent a penny on marketing, yet Friendster has attracted 1.8 million members since its launch last March — 1.7 million more than Barry Diller’s Match.com (IACI ) attracted in its first year.

So last week it finally went down with co-hosts Venrock, Silicon Valley Bank and Gunderson at Meet at the Apartment, an awesome loft in Soho curated by Marc and Sara Schiller.

We kept the gender ratio a strict 50/50, heteronormative perhaps but virtually unheard of in Silicon Alley.

I’ve never actually understood why, exactly – New York is swimming in women running businesses, particularly in tech and media. (ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex).

Some of my favorite pics:

co-hosts Mike Moretti + Brian Hutchings + Ken McVay

Anjula Acharia-Bath + Dan Gerstein

Jenna Wortham + Caroline McCarthy

Hilary Mason + Julie Hansen

Chad Phillips + Baratunde Thurston

Ellie Rountree + Jonah Peretti

Natalie Spilger + Anna Seibert + Evan Harrison + Ingrid Sanders + Shane Steele + Sean Finnegan

Thank you Gabi Porter for photographing!