In a bid to draw more people to its chatroom, new web portal www.BDFriends.org brought the men and women together Friday night at a club in the capital Dhaka, giving many of them their first glimpses of companions they only knew on-line.

"It is interesting and it is a different feeling as we never met in person until now," said one woman after meeting a man she had met through the Internet.

An increasing number of Bangladeshis, many of them teenagers, are joining chatrooms as cybercafes open across the cash-strapped country and personal computers become more affordable.

Bangladesh has an estimated 300 cybercafes, 200 of them in Dhaka.

"Chatting on-line is something virtual and we thought actually meeting one another would be fun -- and it was great fun," said an organiser of the event who goes by the single name Ashish.

Organisers said it was the first event of its kind in Bangladesh, although small private gatherings have been held among friends made on-line.

Bangladesh is trying to set up an optical fibre network and aims to bring the Internet to all stretches of the country by 2005, a telecommunication ministry official said.

SPACE.WIRE