“God, you're not going to ask me what my zodiac sign is, are you?” he asked.

Actually, I was going to ask his Myers-Briggs type, which is a common mode of personality typing and what I consider a very useful tool in relating to individuals, but his reaction to the possibility of being asked what his sign was struck me.

This reaction is not uncommon—those with a scientific-bent consider astrology a pseudoscience; those with a stronger familiarity with psychology think it's more powerful in its ability to suggest personality traits to individuals than help them understand themselves; and those who are firm in their notion that they indeed are a unique snowflake simply can't stomach the idea that they could so easily be pigeon-holed.

I understand the last objection—astrology for some time has been watered down and generalized to better suit a larger audience at the cost of its fascinating brand of insight. The back pages of newspapers and magazines feature predictive blurbs supposedly based on planetary influences, which are, more often than not, made up in-house by unamused interns.

But I've had my chart analyzed and I have to say that I'd get on a great deal better with anyone who took the time to read it. Even the less specific offerings (such as Linda Goodman's or even Joanna Martine Woolfolk's works) provide enough general information to grant any man seeking to charm me a higher chance of success—or at least not enrage me to the point of nuclear explosion.

(That I mention such extremes—charming me versus enraging me—isn't an accident. I'm a Scorpio. I have never set foot on middle ground.)

“To classify me is to ignore me,” a man once told me when I related something to his sun sign in passing. He seemed so hurt by it, I never brought it up again and put my astrological musings on a shelf. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. One, I am deeply fascinated by systems of categorization, in particular this one, and two, even a brief perusal of Goodman's Sun Signs would have prepared me for the mind-warp that lay ahead.

No offense to Gemini men out there—they are generally quite intelligent, talented and entertaining—I'm just not down for wandering around in circles. Give me clear and concise or give me death.

(Or, should I say: give me clear and concise or experience an outburst to put the atomic bomb to shame, quickly followed by a chill the likes of which hasn't been seen since the last ice age. Scorpio, for the win—God, no wonder I'm single.)

Having totally outed myself as an astrology freak, it should come as absolutely no surprise that I'm tickled by MoonIt, a new web site that transcends the concepts of the social network and astrology resource with the goal of providing compatibility assessments based on birth information and user feedback.

The founders Dana Kanze and Mason Sexton, with whom I spoke over the weekend following their awaited debut at TechCrunch50, have more than a passing interest in astrology. Their story goes something like this: in the 1980s, Sexton's father used his knowledge of the positioning of the celestial bodies to his advantage in the stock market, making a believer of the young Sexton, who would often come to him with the birth information of women he was dating for relationship assessments.

“If there was a girl I was interested in, at some point I would ask him, 'hey, here's her birth information, what can you tell me about her?'” Sexton told me over the phone. “This stuff is not a perfect science, of course, and he has made calls that have been a little off, but he's been more right than he's been wrong. Even if it wasn't at first, six months would go by and I'd come back and say, 'you know what? You were right. That became an issue.'”

Sexton and Kanze had gone to school together and been friends, but nothing more. Then, four and a half years ago, they reconnected and Sexton had his father run their chart.

“He told us we had a great dating aspect,” Sexton said.

He and Kanze have been an item since, living together for the past three and a half years, and working together for the past two.

“Beyond dating, he said we had a great business potential,” Sexton added. “That's important, and you can see it's one of the things that we've tried to work into the calculator. The love and relationship part is one of the more compelling parts of our offering, but we do have a business side to this.”

Essentially, MoonIt offers three different angles for every relationship that one enters into a profile. You can see how compatible you and another individual are in terms of friendship, love, and business.

“We realize people's relationships are complex and multi-layered, so we wanted to attack the three different angles,” Kanze told me. “The dating aspect is really important, but sometimes someone keeps running into your life and you ask, 'wow, why do I keep running into this person? I know there is some sort of a cosmic attraction going on there because he keeps coming back into my life—should he just be a friend, should I be working with him, or should we be dating?' Sometimes it's difficult to feel that out.”

“The romantic aspect is more about sexual compatibility—the attraction and chemistry that's there,” Sexton added. “That's singularly important to a relationship, but the friendship aspect really is a window to the potential of a long-term relationship.”

What their site does primarily is compare information in the program based on two given birth dates and provide results based on the strongest aspects.

“Every relationship is really complex and they have a series of different aspects between people, but there is one that's the strongest,” Kanze explained. “That's really the keynote of our relationship, its overriding force in the dynamic. What our algorithm does is search for that strongest aspect.”

During our call, I ran my ex-husband through their application and got four question marks as our compatibility score.

“There are times—and this is very rare—when two people will have a couple of different very strong aspects that are inches apart in terms of degree of differentiation between them, so it's hard to say which is the strongest weighted aspect,” Kanze explained. “Until we have more information about the two people, it's going to be difficult to tell which one is going to rule over the other. Instead of having a canned output that would be satisfying from an instant gratification point but not necessarily valid, we prefer to say it's a hard call—for now.”

“For now” is right—MoonIt runs on a self-learning mechanism that uses feedback from users as well as user responses to community questions on the site to create more accurate descriptions of the relationships that users have added to the application.

Once a relationship has been processed, a user can go back and update it by providing information about the relationship status from a drop down men. I selected the most descriptive choice from these, the ever-amusing, if somewhat harsh “dead to me.”

“The behavioral parts, the users' experience—that's the most important aspect,” Sexton said. “If we can capture that, and weave that into the algorithm, it will make it smarter over time. If there is a pattern we can identify and tweak in for you, then the site will be able to provide a more valuable assessment.”

Refining their application is important to MoonIt's founders. They have already gotten around the pesky problem of not being sure when someone's birthday is by using Facebook Connect to get the information from the popular social network.

“You can also get more specific by putting in a person's birth times,” Kanze told me. “We're planning on running that offering in tandem with Ancestry.com, which has seen really robust growth and has access to millions of people's birth certificate information. We're also interested in going into other disciplines—for instance, psychology is really important. Part of doing that involves not only scraping data from Facebook and Twitter, but also open-source platforms like LinkedIn, where we can get information and match people through their common interests, in terms of their schools, work situations, marital situations, clubs, sports activities, religious backgrounds, to bring an additional layer of relevance.”

Using the information made available by all of us on a regular basis online makes the possibility of improving the accuracy of this tool immensely, creating a marriage of specifics and astrology to surprise even the most skeptical.

“Go with your gut,” said Sexton in closing. “We're just a social-optimization tool to help you navigate these relationships and make more sense of them so you can get more out of them. That's our mission statement.”

Sounds like fun. Maybe I'll ask the six bachelors whose responses to my Craigslist personals ad I found worth answering for their birth information and check out our compatibility on MoonIt. Great idea—assuming they don't think my ad is a brilliant identity theft scheme or that astrology is a silly set of superstitions that takes away from my understanding of their true self.

I wouldn't want to date someone like that anyway.

BLOGGIE TREATS

Does Astrology Play a Role in Romantic Compatibility? by Zandria: “On the online dating site I use, I’ve noticed that some men choose not to display their astrological sign. I don’t think it’s a matter of being ultra-conscientious about identity/privacy issues. I can only hypothesize that some people choose not to display their sign because they don’t want women factoring it into their decision-making process about whether to make contact with them or not. As a Gemini, the only astrological sign I’m opposed to dating is a Scorpio. Read any romance/compatibility report—our signs don’t work well together.”

Venus in Virgo: 21-Sept to 14-Oct 2009 by Neeti Ray: “People with planets in the last ten degrees of the mutable signs have been under a lot of stress lately due to Uranus’s opposition to Saturn; but almost no one has been immune. This aspect is waning now and won’t recur till April 2010. In the meantime, we can use this respite to pick up the pieces and put things right again. You’ll get an opportunity for doing some serious work on your relationship or your finances on 14-October when Venus conjuncts Saturn. This could prove to be a somber day that requires you to put duty before self-gratification. Do what needs to be done because, although Saturn is demanding, he always rewards those who stay true to their duties and responsibilities.”

Astrology: Do You Believe in Saturn's Return? by TresSugar: “If you're anywhere between 27 and 30 and have had, oh, a problem, someone might tell you not to worry — or, actually do worry. It's all part of a perfect celestial storm known as Saturn's return. Taking about 29 years to orbit the Earth, Saturn returns to the place it was in at your birth every 29 years. This means one thing to astrologers — rebirth! Birth is painful; rebirth isn't much better, especially considering Saturn is a sign of growth. Astrologers believe Saturn's return represents life changes: the first time it returns in your late 20s, you enter adulthood. The next time, around 60, you enter maturity, and the final time, at 90, you enter the wisdom of old age. None of it comes easy.”