Types (Niche)

Back in July we mentioned that the PlentyOfFish iPhone App would be here in a few weeks. Well it is now December and I must confess, I forgot all about it.

It looks like the iPhone PlentyOfFish Mobile App has been available on iTunes since August. The current version is 1.02 which was released on Oct 22, 2010. It is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad as long as they have iOS 3.0 or later installed on them. Most of the reviews of this iPhone dating app seem to indicate that is okay (it has a 3 out of 5 star rating) but lacks a few features and should just be used as a supplement if you can't use your laptop at the moment.

Features of the app include searching, checking your matches and sending and receiving PlentyOfFish email messages.

For more information on this dating site, read our review of PlentyOfFish.

They may have been shy about trying online dating when the trend first started, but now Baby Boomers make up the fastest-growing demographic in the online dating market.

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, online dating sites have seen a surge in memberships of those 50+ looking for love. At Match.com, memberships of those aged 50-65 has increased 89% in the last five years. And on JDate.com, members in the 50+ age group jumped 40% in only one year. In fact, its parent company has a website dedicated specifically to the Boomer market called SingleSeniorsMeet.com, and is its fastest-growing property.

Dr. Helen Fisher, anthropologist and consultant for Chemistry.com, notes that Boomers are the perfect candidates for online dating. They have met most of the people in their network of friends and business colleagues, have limited time, and don't usually go to bars, so the Internet is becoming a more appealing way of meeting new people.

Female Boomers seem to be making the most impact, according to Fisher. She states, "Women are powering into the job market; they have more disposable income so they can walk out of bad marriages...The expectation now is that older people are going to date, and remarry."

Baby Boomers have also had more experience with long-term relationships than younger online daters, and are therefore more certain about what they want in a relationship, which works for online dating. According to Match.com, 71% of members 50+ are divorced and 11% are widowed.

"Many Boomer daters sign up for online dating post-divorce or after a long dating hiatus," said JDate spokesperson Arielle Schechtman. "They are busy professionals, so being able to learn about potential dates online, on their own time schedules, makes online dating more valuable to them than to other age groups."

For more information on the dating sites mentioned in this post, please read our Match.com review, Chemistry review, and our JDate review.

According to Ilana Angel, a popular blogger for the Jewish Journal website, earlier this month she had gone out to lunch with a few people who work at the online dating site JDate. JDate had wanted to see how her search for a Jewish match was going. Her previous two relationships with men had been the result of using JDate but this time when she joined, she found she wasn't having the same success. One thought Angel had was, that the men were scared away because she blogs about her dating experiences (even though she doesn't use real names). JDate decided on this lunch to share their recommendations on how Angel can use their site better to find a man she likes and who is not worried about dating a professional blogger.

She hasn't posted yet on how the lunch went with JDate. When she does we will make sure to let you know.

You can read Ilana Angel blog post here and you can find out more about the dating site she talks about by reading our review of JDate.com.

The "Are You Interested" Facebook application is owned by SNAP Interactive. This app recently became the largest dating application on Facebook with 13,262,420 monthly active users. Just a month ago they had only around 8,424,000 monthly active users. Snap Interactive also posted 3rd quarter revenues of $1.65 million which was an increase of over 100 percent when compared to the same period last year. With these rising revenue numbers it looks like Snap Interactive new found traffic is of high quality.

The second largest Facebook dating application is Zoosk with 7,514,381 monthly active users. While "Are you Interested" may have a larger Facebook presence, Zoosk still has a much larger overall membership base thanks to the popularity of their dating website. Zoosk Facebook users also get to interact with the members of the dating website, and vice versa.

For more on this story, check out All Facebook. To find out more about dating on Facebook, please take a look at our Facebook Dating reviews category.

AshleyMadison.com has now opened their affair website to married men and women in the United Kingdom. For those of you who haven't heard of this site before it is described as a traditional dating site but for people who are already married. For UK members it costs £49 for 100 credits. With these credits members can email someone for 5 credits, chat in real-time for another 30 credits and send a virtual gift from 20 to 50 credits.

Apparently there are plans to spend upwards of £10million in advertising if Ashley Madison can get their ads approved by the Advertising Standards Authority. With this type of marketing budget Ashley Madison expects to have 1 million UK members in 3 months.

For more on this story read TNT Magazine.

In mid August eHarmony released their iPhone Dating App. On September 28 a eHarmony Dating App for Android phones was released. As with the iPhone version, users can view their list of matches, look at members profiles, and communicate with them. Communication includes using the guided communication process, sending ice breakers and eHarmony Mail. Some parts of your profile can also be updated through the app as well like your photos (by using the camera built into your phone).

To take this new Dating App for a test drive, visit the Android Pit on your phone to download. To find out more about this online dating service, check out our eHarmony.com review.