eHarmony

eHarmony is having it's last free communication weekend (FCW) for 2013 soon. It is starting December 26th and runs for 7 days and ends on New Years Day of 2014 (January 1). This event is happening on the eHarmony dating sites in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The busiest time for online dating is the first 2 weeks after Christmas. This makes this particular FCW extra popular as everyone is home for the holidays and has some extra time on their hands. If you are single and looking for a long-term relationship then eHarmony with their detailed profiles and complex matching algorithm is an ideal service for you to try. No credit card is required and you are able to try most features of the site which includes sending emails. The only features not included during these free weekends is profile photos, secure call and, skip to email.

If you are interested in taking eHarmony on the go then you can also signup using the Android or iOS app which can be found in their respective market place.

The last free eHarmony communication weekend happened a month ago in November (see Story). For more details about this popular service you can take a look at our review of eHarmony.

Every year, Julie Spira and the team behind Cyber-Dating Expert release a list of the best and newest mobile dating application available. This year's 4th annual list couldn't have come at a better time. A recent Pew report on online dating and relationships examined the impact of mobile dating to find that it is rapidly stealing the spotlight from web-based dating services.

Pew found that 7% of mobile phone owners report using a dating application on their smartphone. There's just something about the convenience of dating with a tiny handheld device that's impossible to resist. And not only does it result in meeting more people, Spira says, it also speeds up the process from first communication to meeting in person.

It turns out Oscar Wilde was right when he wrote "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." At least, he was right about eHarmony, a century before the dating service even existed. Believe it or not, eHarmony's newest matching service, eH+, was inspired by Hollywood.

In 2012, Grant Langston, eHarmony's Vice President of Content and Customer Experience, was given the script to a new film called The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. He'd been given the script because 20th Century Fox had written eHarmony into the story, and wanted the company's cooperation in making its fictionalized service as accurate as possible.

Langston found that the eHarmony portrayed in the movie was nothing like the eHarmony he knew in real life. Once he discovered that Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig would take on the starring roles, he knew something had to be done. He couldn't let such major movie stars, who were bound to draw a large audience, promote an incorrect version of the website. Instead, he saw the film as an opportunity to launch a premium service within eHarmony and make the real-life dating service match up with the one that moviegoers would see on screen.

So eHarmony set out to build the service that was written in the script. In the film, Ben Stiller's Walter Mitty character speaks on the phone with his "eHarmony counselor," who guides him through the process by helping him to build a great profile and coaching him when he hits stumbling blocks. It didn't take long for Langston to see the value in offering a similar service on the real site.

"I began to understand Walter's attraction to this version of eHarmony," he wrote on the company blog. "You're talking to a human being who cares about your success. That's nice. This person is reaching out to you and listening to your feedback. Who wouldn't love that? Your counselor is helping you avoid the pitfalls that are common problems for many people. It's like having a guardian angel!"

The new service was christened eH+ and ideas quickly began flowing. "What if eH+ users were FREE from having to log onto the computer? FREE!" Langston continued. "What if eH+ users could avoid rejection? WHAT?! That's like fat-free bacon. What if eH+ users had a level of privacy virtually unknown in the online dating world?" They may not be things Walter Mitty needed in the film, but they were certainly things that real-life users would love.

And now, when moviegoers leave the theater after seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty this winter, they will be able to sign on to eHarmony and receive the same exclusive service as Ben Stiller himself.

When Aaron Schildkrout cofounded HowAboutWe.com, he had a vision for online dating, one that didn't rely on complex mathematical calculations to determine whether two people are compatible. He pictured a site where real-life dates were the focus, so users got straight to what really matters: meeting face-to-face.

"We branded ourselves as the offline dating site, as explicitly an alternative to these profile-heavy matching algorithm dating sites," he told The Washington Post. "It's about getting offline, going to the real world and getting chemistry."

It appears to be a smart approach at first glance, but since its founding in 2009, HowAboutWe has evolved to depend more on formulas, not less. As more and more users joined the site, the challenge was no longer to show them as many potential dates as possible, but to show them the right dates. In order to create an experience worth coming back for, HowAboutWe needed to get smarter.

HowAboutWe's two-person data science team created an algorithm that combines a user's profile information (like date ideas and demographics) with data gathered from that person's behavior on the site (e.g. what kind of profiles they looked at and how often).

In contrast to HowAboutWe's focus on casual dating, eHarmony believes its users are looking for long term relationships and its algorithm reflects that. eHarmony members are required to fill out a personality questionnaire with hundreds of parts developed from research of around 50,000 happily married couples. To determine compatibility, historical data is paired with analysis of users' behavior on the site and the constraints, like target age range, people place on their matches.

As expected, predicting love is no easy feat. Match.com president Amarnath Thombre says that what users claim they're looking for is often not the kind of profiles they actually view. How did Match cope with the mixed signals? "We said, 'We're going to base these things way more on actions you take. . . . If you start breaking your rules, we're going to start ignoring your rules,' " Thombre explained.

On AshleyMadison.com, the popular matchmaking site for affair-seekers, matching is driven almost entirely by an algorithm. "At least when it comes to the topic of infidelity, traditional research avenues have been kind of absent," said founder Noel Biderman. "There aren't a lot of universities out there that can give you wholesale data on how unfaithful this population or society is or what triggers this."

Can a mathematical formula ever fully replace the magic of serendipity? It seems unlikely, but if the two can work together, we stand a better chance of finding love than ever before.

For more about Aaron Schildkrout dating site you can read our review on How About We.

Good news, eHarmony users! eHarmony.com has just announced the launch of a new service designed to enhance the experience for those who want a higher level of service from their online dating site. The new service, called eH+, offers the best of eHarmony alongside a very special upgrade: a personal counselor.

The counselors are credentialed therapists working with eHarmony founder, himself a psychologist, Dr. Neil Warren. "Finding the love of your life is the single most underestimated challenge in the human experience," said Dr. Warren in a press release. "In the course of the dating process, we know that some people want or need a higher level of service in finding their marriage partner and since this decision impacts your life more than any other single decision, we want to provide help every step of the way."

So what exactly does it do?

"eH+ melds the power of eHarmony's online capabilities with the guidance and care of the matchmaking industry," said Grant Langston, Vice President of Customer Experience for eHarmony. "eH+ is exactly suited to take our proven compatibility algorithms and bring personal, one-on-one attention to the difficult process of finding the right person to share your life. We know that we have more marriages, with more satisfaction and fewer breakups than any other service and we are confident that eH+ will add another layer of strength to our already powerful process."

And that's not all. eH+ also promises:

• Matches chosen for you by your credentialed professional counselor
• Freedom from your computer - no updating profiles, managing matches, or juggling communication
• Matches who have been vetted for interest in you, so you no longer have to wonder whether your interest is reciprocated
• A deeper and more varied set of matches than what you likely would have encountered without an eH+ counselor
• Increased privacy, because your profile isn't automatically exposed to hundreds of people you've never met

If you think all that personalization comes without a price, think again. The bespoke eH+ service will cost $5,000 for a one year subscription. It certainly isn't cheap, but according to eHarmony 66% of its members were surveyed and indicated they would be interested in subscribing (though who knows what "would be interested" actually means?). Unfortunately the service is too new to hear reviews from users.

eH+ launched in beta on November 1, and its official launch is set for December 1. For more information on this dating site and its features you can read our full eHarmony Review.

Are you concerned about your privacy when you use online dating sites? EFF is, and you should be too.

What is EFF? EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to confronting cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights in today's digital world. Of course, no discussion of today's digital world would be complete without a conversation about online dating sites. When EFF examined eight popular online dating sites to see how well they safeguard user privacy, they found that the majority of the sites tested did not take even basic security precautions.

We already took a look at how well the two most popular free dating sites, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid, performed on EFF's tests, and the results were less than stellar. Now the question is: does paying for a dating service guarantee better protection of your privacy? Let's take a look at how major dating sites eHarmony and Match stacked up against the freebies...

Neither Match nor eHarmony uses HTTPS, standard Web encryption, by default. By failing to use HTTPS, these sites expose their users to eavesdroppers when accessed from shared networks. All it takes is free software such as Wireshark for someone to access data that is transmitted in plaintext. This is potentially worrisome on any website, but it's particularly distressing on dating sites where information of a sensitive nature is routinely posted.

The next factor tested by EFF was whether or not the sites are free of mixed content. Mixed content is a problem that occurs when the site is primarily secured with HTTPS, but delivers part of its content over an insecure connection. Even if a page is encrypted over HTTPS, it may still be possible for an eavesdropper to access portions of the page if it displays mixed content. In some cases, EFF warns, a sophisticated attacker could even rewrite the entire page. Both eHarmony and Match contain mixed content.

EFF also tested whether the sites use secure cookies or HSTS. Failing to use secure cookies, which both eHarmony and Match are guilty of, can expose users to session hijacking. HSTS (HTTPS Strict Transport Security) can be used to request the use of HTTPS when communicating with a specific website. The user's browser will remember this request and automatically turn on HTTPS when connecting to the site in the future. Once again, both Match and eHarmony failed to employ HSTS.

Finally, EFF investigated the sites' policies on deleting data after the closure of a user's account. eHarmony's policy was deemed "vague," while on Match.com the fate of a user's information wasn't discussed at all.

So, where privacy is concerned, does it pay to pay? According to EFF, the answer is no. There is no significant difference between free dating sites and paid dating sites when it comes to privacy and security practices.