Are women insane? Perhaps not as a whole (I love me, for instance. But you knew that). But I’ve concluded that certain of my never-married 30-something female friends have completely lost it. I blame, in part, the use of wireless in their search for that perfect partner.

For instance, I was on the phone with my 36-year-old college BFF Liza the other day (names, by the way, have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent). “We have a date to get together, if you know what I mean, and his place or mine is the only decision to make!” she told me breathlessly. “I just couldn’t stand it anymore!”

I was listening to this in shock, because, you see, she had met him using the iPhone ‘Are You Interested’ app, which finds your location and lets you browse pictures of other singles in your geographic area and contact someone with “winks” or private messages. And Liza had received a wink, which is the ultimate cowardly “gee whiz you’re kinda cute” gesture by the way, something that requires no effort whatsoever, and entails no risk of, you know, personal revelation or anything important like that.

So she met the guy at a coffee shop, and subsequently described him as nervous, hard-to-talk-to, 45, paunchy, a two-pack-a-day smoker, balding and “kind of like Dwight from ‘the Office,’ only less healthy-looking.”

And so what’s a mid-30s, pretty, Croatian filmmaker in Los Angeles to do? Why, spark off a wildly passionate text-messaging affair with him of course, since he was going away on a two-week business trip the next morning. And plan a “fooling around” date, as she delicately put it, for when the presumably soon-to-be cardiac victim returned. Whom she hadn’t yet even kissed.

Como say wha?

Dwight, incidentally, ended up having a great personality – which was enough for Liza –but the high level of pressure thanks to all the texting and planning of the hook-up date ended the fledgling relationship before it even began.

And some single women in their 30s and 40s – at least the ones I know – are simply ... delusional. It’s basically an unholy brew of outsized expectations, a lack of understanding of the male psyche, desperation, a mix of conflicting media messaging, and, I suspect, too much Ken and Barbie when they were little.

Wireless makes it worse in some ways, because expectations by and large for modern dating methods can be far out of whack. Women want romance. Women want fun. They want to be absolutely adored. They expect to find a dashing, handsome, cool, hardworking, honest, respectful guy who loves children and animals and never has crass thoughts, however fleeting, of sex with anything inappropriate, be it hookers or watermelons. Someone who can communicate their most vulnerable thoughts and feelings. Someone who can see them for who they are. Someone who prioritizes them above, well, pretty much everything else.

The problem is, of course, that finding this Perfect Man probably isn’t going to happen via the mobile “Hot or Not” contact-me profiles.

But they think they can. All of my single friends have gone mobile, of course, with things like iMate, Match Mobile and the aforementioned ‘Are you Interested.’ The cultural vibe and a legion of press clips tells us that such informationless, location-based hooking up is not only completely mainstream and normal, but in fact can actually work. Consider, ‘Are You Interested’ – or an app very much like it, anyway – was featured prominently in an episode of Fringe last season – shown being used by cool, awesome, fabulous people, of course. No sleazeball playas on ‘Are You Interested,’ right? Oh, not at all.

Many of them are, of course, aware that meat market, skin-deep politics are in full effect. But they just think of it like a game – it’s the initial wrinkle before settling into finding out what the person that just winked at them is really* like. They believe everyone’s looking for the real thing, just like them.

So some play along. My single friend Sasha is reduced to desperately calling herself “IWantUSexyMF” online. Then of course she goes through dark nights of the soul and much reading of post-feminist Naomi Wolff-type treatises to compensate for wasting time on a string of loser, shallow, using dudes, ending up bitter and a little confused as to the path forward.

Oh there are other mobile ills to consider too – texting, for example. My friend Cathy finally had a great date and then spent the next week obsessively hounding the guy, and was cast into total emotional maelstrom if he didn’t get right back to her. There was no second date, and she couldn’t figure out why. She’s gotten so heavily involved in the mobile dating scene that she’s lost touch with what it’s like to just let things happen organically. She was trying to push him to react as she wanted. And what she wants is a South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford type.

It’s instructive to look at my friends’ take on the ongoing saga of Sanford, who has turned out to be quite the oversharer. Not to mention a fine crafter of overwrought “moonlight and body parts”-style love letters. His pronouncements of finding his “soul mate” in his mistress and crying for days in Argentina and all the talk of star-crossed love – all that sheer emotion – has women swooning. My friends eat it up with a spoon. “Wish I could find someone like HIM on Match Mobile,” muttered Sasha, a mid-30s Obama Mama.

Umm ... really? A married father of four that left his kids on Father’s Day and not to mention is an aging, Republican, tea party-supporting, stimulus bill-hating family values hypocrite? Those are presumably important points for my kid-craving left-wing gal pal. But she’s willing to give him a pass on all of that. Because he’s a little closer to what she wants than Bobby from Burbank and his annoying habit of not texting back for minutes and sometimes quarter hours on end.

So bottom line? Juniper Research expects the mobile dating and chat room market to reach nearly $1.4 billion by 2013 – this is clearly a phenomenon that’s here to stay. And ladies, enjoy mobility and what it brings to dating and relationships. But don’t let it twist your expectations or your reactions. And please avoid late-night, Pinot Grigio-fueled texts (Ex.: “You are everything I ever wanted. You are my soul. The air around me. I know we’ve only talked once but ... you are the Ernest to my Julio Gallo.”).

And above all, don’t go looking for married GOP governors to date in hopes of receiving that coveted series of purple prose MMS communiqués.

So. The iPhone 3G S launched today, amid reports of some stores selling out and long lines stretching down the block.

But...yawn...it just didn’t seem that big of a deal.

Maybe I’m suffering from “long-anticipated device launch” fatigue (I’m blaming you, Palm Pre), or maybe it’s because I’m just not that excited to run out and start cutting and pasting things. Whatever the reason, the official iPhone launch today seemed like the most boring story, like, ever.

"We actually have hundreds of thousands of customers that have [pre-]ordered their iPhone and will be coming in to pick it up at the stores today," AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph de la Vega told CNBC.

So in other words, the actual launch itself was a bit ho-hum. Hum drum. Colorless and gray. Not just predictable, but shockingly so.

We already know about the new functionality (video, voice recognition, and yes, cut and paste), and the ability to take advantage of AT&T’s 7.2mbps HSPA upgrade when it goes live, and we know about the pricing and the relative lack of aesthetic tweaks. We know tethering might cost $55. These are stories we’ve been following for days, weeks, months. So what’s new? Some stores sold out? People waited in line? Lots of people want their iPhone upgrade? Well, quelle surprise—not.

When it comes to smartphone launches, well, we’ve already seen that movie. Do we really need 3,003 Google news results on the subject?

Oh, sure, the reports of activation issues are mildly interesting to me —Apple servers are apparently overloaded, an issue that reportedly could take two days to fix. Though even that is a retread of what happened at the last launch.

What we need is color. I want the stories of two grandmas fighting over the last one in stock by whacking at each others’ canes. I want the tale of guy that paid a hobo to wait in line for him, sparking a newfound interest on the part of said hobo in cutting and pasting things. I want the kids in line playing hooky, leaving the Math Club meeting virtually empty. I want Apple to give out free pizza to those waiting in line. I want some oblivious dude to annoy everyone in line with his ventriloquism act (“they loved me!”). I want the human interest, the carnival, the good bad and ugly.

I want Della to sell her hair to buy Jim an iPhone, and I want Jim to have switched to Sprint to save enough money to buy her a set of combs.

Eh, well. Better get onto adding xchange’s official “iPhone 3G S has launched” story to the news heap. If I don’t doze off writing it.

Two very interesting research reports were forwarded to me today. One notes that more than 40 percent of consumers are using social media. And the other is entitled, “The Market for Personal Robots Will Reach $5.26 Billion by 2015.”

Do you use social networking? And if you do, why? Maybe the more burning question is, do you have a personal robot? Would you like to?

Now these might be very disparate topics on the surface, but if you look further I think there’s evidence here that the complete disintermediation from reality predicted by George Orwell and other dystopians in the first part of the 20th century is closer to fruition than ever before, and, we’re all loving it. Who needs actual, real human interaction when we have so many ways to get away from it?

Take Twitter, for instance. An academic study a couple of weeks back found it to be a broadcast medium, one to many – a master-of-the-obvious finding that no one was asking for, really (where do these grants come from??). Twitter’s appeal lies in the fact hat anyone can set up shop and become a little beacon of discourse, agenda-setting, whatever, out to the masses. Become your own Walter Cronkite. And do it in 140-character bursts.

But maybe more importantly, it’s the height of laziness. Oh sure, some call this “efficiency,” or perhaps the more insidious “real-time information dissemination.” But social media is just another linchpin to worshiping at the foot of the inertia gods, as far as I’m concerned. The appeal of Facebook after all is the ability to sort of feel like you’re keeping up with long-lost friends, far-flung peeps and relatives, even the ones you don’t really care for, all by casting an eye over the news feed and updating your status once in a while.

Meanwhile, MySpace is laying off people and is slowly slipping down the ranks of popularity, having been supplanted by other social networks. And frankly, I think it’s because its interface just takes SO MUCH WORK compared to the widget-happy, integration-lovin’ Facebook.

So perhaps it’s no wonder that robots are catching fire (but are they? $5.2 billions’ worth?) for various tasks from rustling dust bunnies to cleaning showers. Who needs to actually clean anything? That might involve getting up from the computer.

Now, if we can just get a robot to sit in the network, securely doing the Twittering for us based on brain wave information sent directly to it wirelessly ... that would be the perfect storm. Well, as long as it doesn’t blow up into some sort of Blade Runner-type situation with perfect facsimiles of ourselves (obviously grotesquely fat selves, one would think), standing in to do the stuff we can’t be bothered to do.

Given the ongoing usage penetration, carriers have an immense opportunity to monetize social networks (since, true to form, social networking can’t be bothered to monetize itself) – but will they take it? If 40 percent of citizens use social media, how can they not? Beyond just racking in the SMS revenue, I mean. I suppose the opportunity comes down to how subscribers use social networking – daily, weekly, monthly? As part of another service?

An AT&T executive just told me this afternoon that the Holy Grail is to just have all applications and content just sort of there in the ether ready to be plucked down from wherever one is (no doubt, kicking it in a lawn chair with a bucket of KFC that the robot just picked up and brought home). That includes wrapping in social media with carrier services that can be sold. Hey – is that a business model sighting? You don’t say.

So again – do you use social media? You tell me – I have a robot ready to compile the results of your feedback.

P.S. Now, ironically on the business front there’s an ongoing effort amidst all of this to make technologically-enabled communications more, well, human. With HD voice, for instance, virtual reality retail kiosks and telepresence (“like you’re in the room with the person!” gushed one Cisco exec to me –Big Brother would love it).