Memberships

Reuters has a piece regarding some U.S. Rabbis who are using Jewish online dating services like JDate to help their single congregants. They are offering subscriptions in the hopes of them meeting someone from the Jewish Faith. The US Jewish community are concerned over their dwindling numbers. Some people have estimated that half of the Jews who married in the United States have married someone from a different faith.

Currently Rabbi Donald Weber of Marlboro, New Jersey and his wife (a rabbi in the liberal Reform Movement) have setup a fund and offer JDate subscriptions to anyone over the age of 18 and who are single, in their congregation.

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.

Hot or Not has decided to abandon their free dating format. The main reason the dating site suggests, is because the number of spammers and fake profiles increased to the point of being out of control and slowing down the system. In my opinion Hot or Not is switching back to a paid dating site because it is more profitable. A couple of months ago they switched to a free dating site system hoping to draw in more users. Free dating sites make money by selling ad space on their site or by the number of users who click on these advertisements. Hot or Not was hoping with their current user base and the additional users they would receive for being free would off set the cost of loosing membership fees. This was obviously not the case.

You must remember running a good dating site, with some sort of quality control of profiles and customer support costs money. Not only that, online dating is a very competitive market and dating services must be constantly upgrading their services and adding new and useful features to their site to help attract more singles, which again costs money. With Hot or Not going with basically the same paid format as before, will benefit singles on the site more in my opinion, than being free.

Wow, I'm not sure how I missed this (and when it exactly happened) but Lavalife has switched from a credit base membership system to a subscription based membership. So instead of buying credits to send an email or instant message, etc. you now have unlimited use of these features for a low monthly price. Lavalife was the only large dating service I know of that had used the credit type system.

I'll update the Lavalife Review soon to include this new information.

Match.com is so sure you will meet someone special within 6 months on their dating site that they have come up with the Make Love Happen guarantee. If not, your next 6 months are free.

A few of the simple rules too follow during your 6 month subscription:

• You must create a truthful profile with a primary photo that is visible.
• Respond to or initiate email communication with at least 5 Match.com members each month.

For full program details visit Match.com. To purchase the Make Love Happen Guarantee program, just simply subscribe today and choose the Love package.

Update 2020-02-11: The Match Guarantee program was discontinued on April 4th, 2019. Any new 6 month subscription purchases after that date will not include the Match Guarantee. If you bought a subscription before this then you have one more chance to use the Guarantee at the end of your subscription term.