Match Group

We heard that OkCupid has sent some emails out to their better looking members letting them know that they have been placed higher in the search results because of their attractiveness. They will also be matched with other members of similarly rated attractiveness.

Say it isn't so OkCupid!

For a dating site which prides itself on its unique way of matching singles through the use of quizzes, this approach makes OkCupid seem more like a hook-up site instead of a dating site which values real relationships. Obviously attraction plays a role in relationships but to automatically push a profile higher because of how well a photo is rated seems one-dimensional.

To find out more about this dating site, read our OkCupid review.

We just got word and have confirmed that Plenty of Fish is currently down at the moment. It looks like it has been offline for at least the last hour (6:30pm EST). If you visit the dating site now you will receive one of the following server error messages:

• Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)
• Server is too busy

It looks like the server is accessible (hence the available error message) but the web service (IIS) is down.

We will update this post when we get more information.

Update #1: As of around 12:00am EST (May31) we have had reports that POF is back up. Though it still appears to be down for us.

Update #2: As of 7:00am Plenty of Fish is back up again. Not sure what happened but everything seems working normally. According to our estimates POF was down for approximately 10 to 12 hours.

For more details on this free dating site, check out our review of Plenty of Fish.

Match.com's free dating site DownToEarth.com was launched in early 2009 but by October of the same year the dating site was taken down and replaced by Stir.com. Stir was aimed more at the college age crowd as it allowed singles to more easily find each other and meet up at bars (think a social networking website for the club scene). Well, as of the middle of this month both Stir.com and DownToEarth.com redirect to SinglesNet.com, which Match.com just recently acuired.

For the moment It seems Match.com has stopped with experimenting with new dating and social networking type sites and instead has opted with acquiring other dating sites and creating partnerships (like the latest one with Yahoo! Personals).

I knew change was a foot on Yahoo! Personals.

I was visiting the site this morning and all was normal and then just a couple of hours ago we were sent official word that Match.com is now the exclusive online dating site for Yahoo in North America. We had hints of this possibility back in May of 2009 when the CEO of IAC (owners of Match.com), Barry Diller mentioned that they were in talks with Yahoo about acquiring their personals service. Yahoo and Match are also no strangers to partnerships. The dating sites for Yahoo UK, Germany, Taiwan are all partnerships with Match.com in Europe. Granted the Match.com European Operations were bought by Meetic last year but these partnership deals were in place long before the sale. It also looks like the partnership with eHarmony that Yahoo Australia had is over with Match.com taking the helm.

For current members of Yahoo! Personals, you will be experiencing a transition period. You have 3 options to choose from:

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.