Features

Here is a small bit of news regarding Zoosk.

According to the WSJ, Zoosk.com plans later this year to start matching singles based on their tastes in music, movies and books. This update to the matching system is in response to a survey Zoosk did of its members that found 57 percent of people found it a turn-on if someone else liked the same books as they did. Zoosk also confirmed that common shared interests like those of movies, music and books are great topics for initiating a conversation.

To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our review of Zoosk.com.

With the recent downtime of PlentyofFish a number of members contacted me asking a few questions about the dating site. One of them was:

... can you tell me what happened to the POF Forums/Message Board?

To my surprise, it looked like at first glance that the forums have been removed from Plentyoffish.com. The forums were quite popular on the site with hundreds of posts being added every day. Looking deeper into the problem the person who asked me this question said he found that the forums still existed but the link to them had been removed from PlentyofFish a while ago. He then asked me why? My best educated guess is that the forums were too distracting to members. The owner of POF wanted people to use his dating site where ads are being displayed. The more ads viewed and clicked on by visitors the more money the website will make (this is how most websites and publications make money, including the one you are reading now). Since the forums don't display ads (and therefore do not make money) I figure that is why the link to them was removed. With no link, new members wouldn't find out about the forums and stay just on the dating site while still allowing the older members who knew about the forums to continue to use them.

For those of you looking for the PlentyofFish forums, you can still find them here or, if you like you could try posting in our own dating site advice forums.

While I was checking out the PlentyofFish forum issue I notice that there were a few new features. First off it looks like Upgraded Members (those of you who paid for the Serious Members Badge) now have their profiles displayed to local users at the top of their search results. Originally the upgraded membership was suppose to show your intent to the dating community that you are serious about dating (see Story), that is why it was called the Serious Member Profile Upgrade. As we thought though, this badge has slowly but surely morphed into a full membership upgrade that now even affects the search results. I am not saying this is a bad thing as we knew it would eventually happen, it was just funny how POF didn't originally want people to think they had a paid membership.

A few other new features I noticed included some search options. You can now search for users in a specified zip code who logged in at least once a day. The average user displayed by this search actually logs in 3 times a day to PlentyofFish. The other new search option is a "Will Respond" search. This is supposed to return users who will most likely respond to a message from you if you view their profile. The average user from this search last logged in about 20 hours ago and they are expected to be online again in the next 3 hours. Both of these search options are a great idea!

The last new item I found is a statistic. According to PlentyofFish, every day 1.4 million people use their dating site. In 2009, this number was 900 thousand.

For more details on this popular online dating site, please read our review of PlentyofFish.

It looks like members of PlentyofFish.com will have another way soon to access the dating site. In a few weeks (July, 2010) an iPhone Application will be released which will allow members to access the dating site directly on their iPhone, iTouch and iPad. No information has been released yet on what features will be available on the dating application but I assume profile editing, searching and sending messages will be possible. I am curious to see if location based dating will be included with this new application.

Since an iPhone POF Dating App will be here soon I wonder how far off an application for Android will be? Android mobile phones are now outselling the iPhone here in the States.

To find out about POF, you can read our review of PlentyofFish.com.

Markus, the CEO of Plenty of Fish, posted on his blog with word that they have updated their Chemistry Test. They now use a new and more advanced predictive statistical model which now will give you a list of 30 matches that you are most likely to end up dating and falling in love with. He mentions that they spent year's collecting dating from POF members of who they dated, who they broke up with, and who married. With this information in hand, Plenty of Fish used it to create a model which generates better matches than before for the average user.

As with the older test at Plenty of Fish, the new Chemistry Test still measures 5 dimensions of personality. They are Self-Confidence, Family Orientation, Self-Control, Social Dependency and Easygoingness. These factors were determined by POF to be essential for building a successful long-term relationship.

To find out more about this dating site, read our review of Plenty of Fish.

OkCupid's blog post about picture myths was very popular. To capitalize on this OkCupid has released an experimental widget that will generate a report for you based on votes from members of OkCupid. All you need to do is upload a couple of photos. Once completed you will then need to help out and analyze other people's photo submissions (or how else will someone analyze yours? Pay it Forward!). After a little while a detailed report will be made available showing which photo was considered the best for a dating site.

In your report you get to see how many people voted and a list of 16 personality types of how people voted in a bar graph for each photo. This allows you to find out, for example, if Artists, Christians, Divas or Jocks either loved your photo or preferred a different one you uploaded. It also lists in the bar graph the age range and gender of the people who voted to give you a better idea if your pictures appealed to a younger or older audience.

MyBestFace looks to be sort of a smarter version of a picture rating website like Hot or Not .

To try My Best Face, visit this page and to find out about this dating site, check out our review of OkCupid.

The custom of arranged marriage is very popular in India but in countries like the United States and Canada it is not popular. In North America when a match could not be found locally, families from India and other Asian countries sometimes resorted to using newspaper classified sections to find a potential suitor for one of their children. This practice has now changed thanks to online dating. Dating sites like Shaadi.com have matched more than a million South Asian couples and now parents are logging on to find potential matches for their children. Many parents find "religion, mother tongue, residency status, education, caste or class, astrological sign and diet" important attributes in a mate for their child. Shaadi.com does keep track of this information within member profiles which makes it easy for parents to find matches. Roughly 20 percent of profiles on Shaadi were created by parents looking for a partner for one or more of their children. The average age of a profile is in the range of 26 to 35.

In Canada Shaadi.com has become so popular that they have opened up their first North American center in Mississauga Ontario in March of this year (close to Toronto). The greater Toronto area is home to more than 700,000 South Asian Canadians making it ideal for a matchmaking center. Shaadi also has started to promote their new center not only online, but off as well through billboards and other physical media to better reach their target audience.

To find out more details about this dating site, check out our review of Shaadi.com.