Features

New Ads

As per this recent story, Chemistry.com to Spend $40M on TV Ads, it looks like Chemistry.com new TV ads called "Chemistry Vows" will be coming to a TV near you. The four new commercials will appear on the NBC network along with Bravo, HGTV, TBS and A&E. After viewing the commercials and seeing the list of networks the commercials will be aired on, Chemistry is definitely targeting the 30 and older crowd. This makes sense since Chemistry is all about the long term relationship, something that most 20 to 29 year olds are not looking for yet, either do to school or job advancement, etc.

New Feature

To improve members experience with online dating, Chemistry has added the feature "You've Been Noticed". This feature allows members to find out who has viewed their profile. According to Chemistry:

eHarmony has added free Icebreakers to their dating service. This allows non-paying and paying members to pick from 11 predetermined short messages and send it to their matches. Icebreakers include simple messages like, "Great pic…love to see more photos!". This type of feature has been used for a long time on other dating services so it is in no way a revolutionary thing but, I do think eHarmony needed to add them.

What Icebreakers do (and this has always been a major complaint with eHarmony members) is it gives free members the ability to see if their matches are currently using eHarmony and are not just potentially old profiles of members who don't log in anymore. If the new members has a match they really like, by sending an Icebreaker and getting a reply back they know it's an active profile and it will be most likely worth signing up to the service to pursue the communication. The only problem here is that eHarmony choices for Icebreakers are rather limited. Replying to an Icebreaker with any of eHarmony's current list of Icebreakers doesn't make sense. Most of the Icebreakers either ask a question or want you to do something like talk or request a picture, so there is no real way to say yes or no to a Icebreaker question.

Icebreakers will also give eHarmony more paying members in the long run for the same reason stated above. This is the second major feature eHarmony has added in the last few months. They obviously are feeling the competition from other serious matching sites like Chemistry and PerfectMatch.com. I wonder what else they have up there sleeve?

Related Story: eHarmony Members can now see "Who Has Viewed Me"

MillionaireMatch.com recently updated their website with some new features. The main new feature is members now can have their photos verified. This works well in conjunction with verifying your income level since, some of the same documentation is needed to do both. Your photo and income level are the two most important parts of the profile on these types of dating sites and having them verified as authentic gives members who have performed this free service a huge advantage over non-verified members. Singles searching through profiles are much more likely to contact a verified member.

The searching of members has also been tweaked. You can now easily remove unwanted profiles from view and you now have the ability to do keyword searching. Keyword searching taked into account the text in the two essay profile questions. You also can now get your profile highlighted in the search results which draws the viewers eye to it first and makes it stand out much more.

For more information, please read our MillionaireMatch Review.

It's official now! The "Who Has Viewed Me" feature is now available to members of eHarmony. You can now see members who have viewed you from up to 2 weeks ago. There is also a new option in your Match Settings which allows members to show their views of profiles as anonymous instead of showing their membership name.

This feature has the side affect of now allowing singles to see if a member is currently actively using eHarmony. If you send them a mail message and if their is no view of your profile (let alone a reply) by the eHarmony member, most likely then it is an inactive profile (unless the member is on vacation or something).

The unofficial eHarmony Blog got a little scoop regarding the possibility of a "Who has viewed me?" feature. SingleGuyInNC noticed the disabled option when it flashed briefly on his screen when he signed into eHarmony today.

If this is a new feature that eHarmony will be adding soon, it should help with the complaints in our user reviews regarding not been able to see which profile has had their member login recently. If some one has viewed you then you know it is an active profile. The only problem is, you still don't know if he or she is a paid member and can communicate with you. Still, I hope they add this feature in. Better yet, eHarmony should just tell us in the profile view when the member has last logged.

For more information on eHarmony, please read our review.

eHarmony announced yesterday that they have a new online id verification service for its members. This service, which is provided by ReliID allows eHarmony members to validate their full name, age and address. RelyID uses publicly available information for the id verification. Once members are verified they will have a RelyID badge displayed with their profile showing other users that they have completed the process successfully.

I'm glad other large dating services have started to offer this type of verification service. It's a great first step which willl go a long way in helping people trust the information they find in a profile. This should generate a lot more communication for eHarmony members who have been verified. But, how much further can eHarmony go? True.com does criminal background checks and I have seen some other sites like MillionaireMate.com verify photos. It would be great to see all of these services combined. I wonder if this service is available on eHarmony Canada?

For more information on this new verification process read this News Release and for more information on eHarmony, check out our review.

Update 2008-01-16: I just notice that Online Dating Insider has some more information on this new verification service including the cost ($5.95) and how the actually verification takes place.

Update 2019-10-22: Please note that the Online Verification Service is not available anymore.