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I found a press release that announces the partnership of DatingHeadshots and Honesty Online to be a little over the top. In the first sentence they compare Justin Timberlake being sexy to the two dating companies new partnership. 😲

What the two companies are now offering is a complete Verification Package. On the photo side you get a professional photographer and a photo shoot. Government ID is checked to ensure the person who ordered the photos is the one at the photo shoot. Afterwards the person can then complete the Honesty Online verification process. This process uses information from your past to verify the person's identity by asking you multiple choice questions. A more thorough background, job and education check can also be completed at an additional cost.

This is an ideal merger of these two services, having your photos and background information being verified together. Plus, with the photos you get recent professional shots that helps give a strong first impression. Unfortunately I went to both sites and could not find any additional information on this partnership or service. I have a feeling it may be more money than people are willing to spend. It is also unclear on the Honesty Online website which dating sites use their services. I know they have a Facebook application but, it does me no good to get a verification package if I can't show myself as being verified on my favorite dating site.

You want someone special in your life but, you don't want to use online dating and your circle of friends have limited social networks, what do you do? You could try a Professional Matchmaker. They bring singles together by offering a personal touch with face to face interactions. A professional matchmaker is ideal for you if you have a very busy schedule and you don't want to spend inordinate amounts of time searching and viewing online dating profiles of potential partners. The 3 most popular matchmaking services available in most major cities in the United States are The Right One, It's Just Lunch and Great Expectations. Both The Right One and It's Just Lunch state that:

... the majority of their clients are in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and come from all walks of life. And while there are fluctuations in the number of males to females who use the service, both sexes, for the most part, are evenly represented.

Members of these services tend to be the busy professional who wants to have a partner in their life but don't have the time to find one. For this premium type of service don't expect to pay online dating site prices. Prices start at around $1000 for a year of service with a professional matchmaker (this depends on the level of service you want), about 3 times as much as the average major dating site for the same time period. For this price all you need to do is give details on yourself, your personality and what type of person you are looking for. From here, most of these services will take this information and your schedule for the month, figure out who suits you best and setup some dates for you.

The Right One matching service is the oldest and has been around for 34 years (1975) and promotes the fact that nationally, they are responsible for, on average, 1 match every 17 minutes and 1 marriage per day. They also belong to an independent organization called the Matchmaking Institute which we discovered recently (see Story). The Matchmaking Institute was established in 2003 to set strict quality standards and a code of ethics in the matchmaking industry.

It's Just Lunch International has been matching singles for the last 18 years (1991). They offer their service not only in the US, but in Australia, Canada, and parts of Europe and Asia from 100 different locations. It's Just Lunch has about 30,000 members in total. who on average go on 50,000 dates a month. About 70 percent of dates lead to a second date.

Great Expectations has about 30 years of experience in matching (1980?) and over 50 locations nationwide. According to their website they have 100,000 members across the US. Currently, we do not recommend this service, do to the Arizona Attorney General filing a lawsuit against them in 2008 (see Story).

Professional matchmakers usually always are in major cities and have a smaller pool of daters than the major dating sites. What professional matchmakers may lack in number of clients (when compared to online sites) they make up in servicing the customer. You also are paying for the human intuition of the ability to size people up to determine what type of person would make a good match for them.

For more information on matchmaking professionals, check out our Matchmaking Services category.

We have talked before about the dating site called Scientific Match which uses DNA and the body's natural fragrance to match compatible singles (see Story). The Discovery Channel has an article which examines the dating site and the science behind it called Major Histocompatibility Complex or MHC for short. The idea is that opposite immune systems attract, thereby making it easier for any offspring of the relationship to fight off disease. To back up the science in their match system, ScientificMatch.com has more than:

40 peer-reviewed and published studies documenting the positive effect of different MHC's in couples.

The problems in which Scientific Match is having, is trying to gather enough members to be able to create proper matches. Plus these matches are not cheap and cost nearly $1000. Plus, Scientific Match still needs to screen potential matches for the normal profile attributes like location, age range and other preferences. That is why they are now considering licensing the technology to other dating sites.

For the full story, check out The Discovery Channel website.

The free dating site by Match.com called Down To Earth was launched in January and since then, they have had more than 100,000 members join. On average, Down To Earth has about 1,500 members join every day. According to DownToEarth Spokesman Tori Johnson:It’s very user-friendly, it’s completely free, and you can post images of yourself, Johnson said. It’s like a normal profile. Solotaroff said online dating is increasing among Americans. There are 93 million eligible singles in the U.S. and about 3 million are using paid dating sites, he said. Free online dating also is growing – at a rate of about 70 percent per year.

Down To Earths market is the College-aged crowd (18-25) which they currently have about 21,000 members. By the end of 2009, the goal for total number of memberships at Down To Earth is 250,000. The dating sites main feature which makes it fairly unique is the RealRatings system. It is designed to keep married people out and dating profiles honest by allowing other members to score a person's profile accuracy after a date. The score is a 1 to 5 star rating.

For more information on the dating site, read our Down To Earth review.

I was doing some Yahoo! Personals research and came across some interesting information. Yahoo! Personals has 13 international sites and I had always thought they were all based on the U.S. and Canadian Yahoo dating websites. I was wrong. It looks like some of the international dating sites are actually partnered dating sites. Basically what this means in the dating world is the underlying dating site is actually run by another company. The dating service itself still retains the other partners logo and general theme of the website (in this case Yahoo). Partnering like this is not necessary a bad thing since the partner usually are experts and already successful in their field. Both partners benefit with the relationship, with each endorsing the other.

From what I can tell, Yahoo! Personals for the UK & Ireland is actually the Match.com UK dating site. Yahoo! Personals for Germany and Taiwan is Match.com as well. Yahoo! Personals France, Italy, Brazil and Spain is part of the Meetic Network of European dating sites. I would also question the Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Yahoo dating sites.

This leaves just the US, Canada and the Australian Yahoo dating sites being actually owned and run by Yahoo. The Yahoo dating site for Australia though, is partnered with eHarmony Australia. On Yahoo's main dating page you have the choice of going directly to Yahoo Dating to search for singles or visit eHarmony Australia to let them find your matches for you. This is a similar idea to AOL's partnership with eHarmony (See Story).

I guess I was more surprised than anything else. I had always figured Yahoo being so big that they would have created and run their own dating sites for these countries.

For more information on Yahoo! Personals, read our online dating review.

UPDATE: Wow, I must of been reading eHarmony's mind! They released a press release yesterday (which I just saw today, Nov 12) announcing eHarmony Australia and Yahoo's partnership.

For the last few months Gay.com has been updating not only their dating website software but the hardware as well. From the new updates, one website called QUEERTY has reported that Gay.com has been offline more than it has been online this month. If this is the case, I would hope Gay.com gives paying members another month for FREE to thank them for putting up with all the trouble.

Here is a quote from Gay.com's Blog about some of the issues:

So what can you expect in the days ahead in terms of on-going improvements and our communication to you about them?

1. We are adjusting our hardware configurations and software code to further speed processes. Despite extensive pre-launch testing, a site of the scale and complexity of gay.com is virtually impossible to emulate in a test lab. Additionally, we have seen new usage patterns from the site that we could not model and are adjusting our hardware and code to streamline and improve performance. With the addition of more servers earlier in the week, we have seen positive results in overall site speed. We continue to monitor site performance and may add additional capacity as necessary.
2. We continue to identify and fix the bugs that have resulted in unplanned system outages.
3. We are committed to customer service and getting everyone on the site. We have received a tremendous number of phone calls and emails with your questions and suggestions. We are working to meet your needs as fast as we can. We also know that many people still cannot get into chat for technical reasons. Should you need help immediately, we keep an up-to-date Known Issues link on our blog at http://gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog.
4. We promise to be as open as possible in our communication to you. We know these changes (both the relaunch itself and the follow-on outages) can be confusing and frustrating. We will do our best to let you know what is happening, and when and how it may affect you as a user of the site. Given the changes that we need to make, we know that we will need to have a few more planned outages. We will do everything possible to give everyone adequate advance warning of these outages. Whenever possible, planned outages will be conducted in off-peak hours.

Find out more and see the full apology letter to members at the company's blog. For more information about the dating site Gay.com, including costs and features of this matchmaking service, check out our Gay.com review.