In an unwieldy world of 12-hour workdays and battles with rush-hour traffic, who has the time to meet new people, let alone date?

The widespread desire by singles to enlarge the dating pool has led to the latest phenomenon in modern romance: speed dating.

With names like HurryDate, ExpeDate and Rapid Dating, such services allow singles to meet eight to 25 potential squeezes in a regimented yet festive evening. Participants sign up online for a round-robin system of three- to 10-minute meetings -- generously termed ``dates'' by organizers -- for $20 to $35 per event.

But do these services really work? As I signed up for an 8MinuteDating event at http://www.8minutedating.com/ earlier this month, I asked myself if I was being reduced to a first impression with a name tag. I later learned that it's name and number, as organizers printed ``Mark 211'' on my personalized adhesive.

``Speed dating gives people an alternative,'' explains Sue Deyo, a Stanford graduate who, with her husband Rabbi Yaacov Deyo, wrote ``SpeedDating: A Timesaving Guide to Finding Your Lifelong Love'' (Quill, $10.95). ``You have a personal, face-to-face conversation. Nowadays, you sometimes need a sledgehammer to break the ice.''

Started in Los Angeles in 1999 by Rabbi Deyo and his students, SpeedDating claims that 50 percent of its singles find a match. The service, which signed up 7,000 Jewish singles in 14 cities in 2002, established a template for more recently established services appealing to a broader audience.

8MinuteDating, which is not religiously affiliated, boasts a 60 percent success rate and has attracted more than 65,000 customers in 60 cities since it was founded by former Microsoft product manager Tom Jaffee in 2001.

Besides organizing evenings based on the age of participants, companies such as 8MinuteDating also have singles events geared toward ethnicity, sexual orientation, special interests and even height.

The event I attended with 26 others at Julie's Supper Club in San Francisco wasn't the painful, superficial experience I had feared. The mix of participants in their 30s at the hipster nightclub ranged from entrepreneurial to unemployed, from natty to frumpy, from enthused to understated. They came from Santa Clara, San Jose, Oakland, Foster City and San Francisco, all with the goal of seeing if this was an effective way to cast the dating net a little wider.

We were handed the equivalent of a dance card, listing our assigned seating for eight rounds. When the bell sounded the end of each encounter, we wrote the date's name, whether she (or he) was courteous and whether we wanted to contact that person for dating, friendship or business. A matchup occurs when an individual you're interested in meeting indicates a mutual interest. The event also included an intermission for ambitious minglers who spotted someone in the room they hadn't formally met.

Alas, I learned by e-mail that I didn't match up with the two women I chose to date for real, but everyone I spoke to was pleasant and the whole experience was less awkward than approaching a stranger in a Learning Annex class.