Features

Over the last few years PlentyOfFish has tried several different ways to monetize their members. They first offered paid virtual gifts back in December of 2008. It didn't last long though and was pulled after about a month. In March of 2009 PlentyOfFish then offered the "Paid Profile Upgrade". This upgrade called the "Serious Member Badge" was designed to showcase that the member was serious about online dating by displaying icons on your images and highlighting your profile. Prices ranged from $5.95 to $9.80 a month. By mid-2010 the Serious Member Badge also offered a few additional features including having their profile appear above others in search results.

Early this month PlentyOfFish started to offer a new regular membership. As far as we can tell this membership has replaced the Serious Membership along with the “privilege of upgrading” assessment which was supposed to weed out all those who were not serious about maintaining a long-term relationship. The new membership offers:

• The new and improved Ultra Match matching system
• Improved visibility on PlentyOfFish including higher placement in search results
• Find out if your emails were read or just deleted
• The use of profile themes
• Who has viewed your profile
• Unlimited virtual gifts through email
• Additional credits for placing gifts on profiles

Membership costs have increased slightly and range from $6.78 a month for a year to $11.80 a month for a 3 month term. There is no auto rebilling but memberships are also non-refundable. With these new membership changes the only thing that differentiates PlentyOfFish with most other popular paid dating sites is that they still allow all members to email and message each other for free.

With the new membership comes a new statistic. If you upgrade to the new membership it will improve your chances by 530% according to PlentyOfFish (I assume this is when compared to a free membership on the site). With the Serious Membership upgrade your chance of a relationship only increased by 230% 😉 (See Story).

I also notice the other week that the domain Plentyoffish.com now forwards to POF.com, this use to be the other way around. The URLs in the emails I receive from PlentyOfFish for matches etc. also use the POF.com domain though the email is still sent from customercare@plentyoffish.com. The site is still obviously called PlentyOfFish so I am not sure why they changed the primary domain at this point to just the initials. Maybe it will be easier to remember for the average user, or maybe there will be a name change in the future? (I really doubt this will happen)

The last thing that has changed is that the forums link is now back at the top of the PlentyOfFish dating site. We notice that this link first disappeared sometime last summer (See Story). The upgrade link in the forums though still points to the old “SERIOUS UPGRADE” page and not the new membership upgrade page.

To find out more about this dating service you can read our POF review.

Late last month eHarmony announced a new feature for their dating service. Members can now tell when their matches were last on the site by checking out the "Active Within" enhancement that is visible (or will be soon) next to the matches name. The activity is broken down into 5 increments with "Today" being the shortest and "Over three weeks ago" being the longest.

This feature has been requested for a long time as it helps members to prioritize which of their matches they should contact first. You have a better chance of contacting someone who was just on the site as opposed to over 3 weeks ago.

For more on this story you can read the eHarmony blog and to find out more about this dating site, please read our review of eHarmony.

According to the blog "Breaking the online dating sound barrier”, the dating site Plenty Of Fish only accepts users from Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. I did try creating a new user from China and I didn't have any problems (I had the account deleted), so POF must check the IP of the user to see what country it is from before they allow them to register.

The other bit of news about Plenty Of Fish is, it now supports 4 languages. Before now the site was only available in English. As of a few days ago French, German and Spanish versions can be accessed with an Italian version coming soon. This means any text from the user interface (menus, links, etc.) along with all help and information pages are available in the language. The only thing that doesn't get converted is any text a user may have typed for profile fields like the About Me section.

For more information on this story you can check out Fernando's Blog and to find out more about this dating site you can read our Plentyoffish.com review.

To streamline the profile creation process for mobile users eHarmony announced last month that they put together a questionnaire for their profile that can be completed in about 10 minutes. eHarmony's normal relationship questionnaire can take about an hour or so to complete.

The mobile questionnaire has 100 questions that eHarmony has tested and experimented with to ensure that mobile users who fill out this shorter version will still receive very high quality matches. They have also updated the interface to use the touch screen much more effectively with less key strokes or touches. Users question will now auto save as well so they can come back at any point and finish up the questions if something comes up.

The look and feel of the dating app also has changed to make it more personal. The test is now constructed like a book with chapters. To help people answer questions more accurately some of the profile questions also have been re-phrased into first person statements.

To try out this new version (1.4.1) of eHarmony's dating app you can visit iTunes.

For more information you can visit the official eHarmony blog and for more details on the dating service you can read our review of eHarmony.

I have been reviewing Match.com again recently and found a few mail message features that I had missed. It looks like both of these features where added in the first half of 2010 (at least that was when the information was added to help).

VIP Email

A Very Interested Person or VIP Email message can be sent by a subscriber to indicate that they are particularly interested in the person who is receiving the message. What makes this email different is that a Match.com member can send only one a week. With a VIP Email, Email Read Notification is included for free (there usually is an upgrade charge for this). The message will also be bolded and highlighted green in the receivers email box so it is easier to identify. Plus, your profile will be highlighted on the receivers Match.com's Connections page for 30 days.

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.