What is PenFaces?
The International Friendship League's Penpal service that connected people across the world by processing a one-time application into a pool. The application remained in the pool until it was considered complete. A complete application was one that was matched with a penpal for each of the criteria requested: hobbies, countries requested, languages (required), marital status, gender (required) and age group. If an applicant requested a female penal who speaks japanese and has also listed a hobby such as tennis, the application will remain open until such a profile is found. Bear in mind that many "suggestions" will be provided to the applicant that may contain at least two of the required criteria.
Over the years, the application pool simply got larger and larger and the decision tables that the IFL was using to match people were simply not processing them fast enough (e.g. they were a bottleneck). Therefore, the IFL has decided to embark upon a new service, the PenFaces service. One that used the power of the masses, the network as you will of all the applicants to help match any given applicant.
Additionally, after discovering the many games that "friend networks" were playing, it became clear that their might be a business opportunity in pen pals. PenFaces was an attempt to study this behavior and sell the findings to marketing and ad firms.