POF (Plenty of Fish)

The latest video for the track Available by Flo Rida is featured only at Plenty of Fish. This song is off his new album R.O.O.T.S. and contains Flo Rida surfing the Plenty of Fish dating site on a laptop looking through profiles and singing about being a single man. Flo must be serious about dating since he was only viewing members who had upgraded their membership. 😀

I am not sure how this partnership between Flo Rida and Plenty of Fish came about? Did Plenty of Fish pay to be in the video? Both parties benefit from the partnership and increased media exposure. The video is on a site that gets millions of hits a month, which is good for Flo Rida anda younger audience than usual will be visiting Plenty of Fish to check out the new video and possibly create a dating profile as well.

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

On Tuesday we reported that Plenty Of Fish was down for over 10 hours. Today we found out why. Late Monday a power outage made POF go offline. With the website already down, it was decided that it was a good time to upgrade the core database server (both hardware and software) which hadn't been touched since 2005. Users of the dating site should see significant increase in speed of the site loading, especially during peak times.

We also found out that there is an upgraded scheduled for image serving. Nearly 10,000 images on average are served per second on POF and they currently have over 200 million images stored. Will we see additional downtime next week while this upgrade is performed? Markus didn't mention any but we may see one if moving image servers doesn't go off without a hitch.

A received a number of visitors emails late yesterday informing me that PlentyOfFish.com was down. POF was offline for at least 8 hours on June 9, 2009 (thanks Glennis) and currently 3 hour this morning (June 10, 2009).

From what I could tell at 12:30am EST was the POF web server is up but not serving web pages. So it doesn't seem to be a network problem. I am just making an educated guessing here but, It could be a software glitch, a hardware issue (bad hard drive?) or maybe the dating site got hacked? When I get any new information I will post it here.

The last major downtime for Plenty Of Fish was back in late February (see Story).

Update #1: As of 8:30am EST, Plenty of Fish is online and working without any problems. The exact time it went back online is unknown.

Update #2: POF was down due to a power outage and a upgrade to the core database server (see Story).

For more information on this dating site, read our Plenty Of Fish review.

CNN did a post about virtual currencies and economies. It is estimated that at least $1 billion USD were transferred into virtual currencies last year. The biggest use of virtual currencies are online games, followed by social networks and virtual worlds. Some websites even earn more revenue through virtual currencies than online advertising. The massive online multiplayer game, World of Warcraft (or WoW for short) uses WoW Gold. Even though it is against the rules set by Blizzard, this currency is bought and sold on the black market. This currency is so sought after, workers in China have been known to play the game just to earn the virtual WoW currency to sell to players in Europe and the US.

Social networking sites like Hi5 and MyYearBook have created their own currency as well. Hi5 has the Hi5 Coin and MyYearBook calls their currency Lunch Money. Hi5 Coins are mainly used to buy virtual gifts while with Lunch Money you can buy virtual gifts, play games and even donate it to charities. Facebook is looking into a unified currency since all the games and application on their platform that use a virtual currency has been created by the application developer. The problem with this for members is, the currency is only good with that one application. Facebook also doesn't see any revenue from these virtual currencies. This could be a way out for Facebooks revenue problems. If they create one unified Facebook currency for the entire site, not only could members spend it through any Facebook applicationg they want, Facebook would get a cut from each transaction.

The virtual world Second Life also has a currency called Linden Dollars. You can trade real currency for Linden Dollars which you can then buy whatever is for sale on Second Life (virtual real estate, entertainment, stores, etc..). Just like with real currencies, the Linden Dollar fluctuates daily against the USD. The buy and sell prices are set by the residents of Second Life on the LindeX Currency Exchange.

Some dating sites have a form of virtual currency called points. While you can't trade or buy something from other members, you can purchase virtual gifts, features and extended memberships from the dating site itself. Usually the way you earn points is by using and / or participating in the dating site. Two dating sites that I know of who use points this way is, Plenty Of Fish and, the FriendFinder Network of dating sites. With POF, every time you log into the site you earn 60 points, with a maximum of 60 points total every 24 hours These points can be used to buy virtual gifts for other members. With FriendFinder you receive points for participating in the site by adding or voting on articles, replying to questions and voting on topics. When you have earned enough points you can then purchase membership upgrades with them. This can include adding extra months to your membership and having your profile highlighted.

Check out CNN.com Technology for the full story. Read our FriendFinder review for more information on this dating service.

Here is another story from my draft folder. Back in February, PC World looked at the matching algorithms of attraction and the business models behind some of the more popular online dating sites.

Here are a few interesting statistics which emerged from their review of the industry as a whole:

• For 2009 the dating industry is expected to top $1.049 billion and is likely to grow at a rate of 10 percent.
• It is estimated with free dating sites, at least 10 percent of new accounts created each day are from scammers.
• With paid dating sites, on average 10 percent of members pay for the service and stay for less than 3 months.
• In November 2008, online dating traffic as a whole was over 22 million with males making up 52.4 percent of the total number of visits (females 47.6 percent).
• Average time spent per visit to the top 10 online dating sites in 2008 was 22 minutes and 27 seconds.

A lot of the information mention in the article we have talked about before, so I will only discuss any new details. What we did learn, deals more about the hardware needed to run a busy dating site and the process of matching. For instance (WARNING tech talk coming), eHarmony has over 4 terabytes of information on more than 20 million registered members, each who have completed the 400 to 256 profile questions (eHarmony's profile has gotten shorter over the years). After a user signs up at eHarmony, a 10 Gig Oracle database is used to match you with initially, a few members. Apparently the real matching takes place later when your answers are matched up with thousands of other users who have answered hundreds of questions. The whole process takes almost 1 billion calculations and is done in a batch operation at the end of each day. This is a lot of calculations to find matches for a single user. It also tells me that while the initial database is probably filled with the most current users who are using eHarmony now, the matches which you may be more compatible with, will be given to you in a day or so from the much larger database. To give you an idea of the size difference between the two, the main database is about 400 times larger. eHarmony also says a members actions and outcomes on the site is stored and used to help determine matches. The example given deals with your geographical limit you set when you first filled out your profile. If you say, set it to 20 miles, but the eHarmony matching system sees you are viewing members who live farther away, then your location limit will be adjusted. This is because, eHarmony will assume location of a match isn't a deal breaker for you (so only click on those long distance matches only if you really want to travel).

PerfectMatch.com (which has 5 million members) has a lengthy profile as well when compared to most other dating sites, but it still only takes about half of the time to complete when compared to eHarmony's. For their dating site, Perfect Match uses 5 web servers and a number of SQL server database servers. A number of other servers are also used to handle messaging and marketing needs. According to the company, PerfectMatch.com's matches happen right away, there is little to no delay.

PlentyofFish.com is also mentioned and the article. According to the author, POF wants to keep things simple when it comes to the profile and searching. The thing is, POF does have a Chemistry test which for some reason is not mentioned. Plenty Of Fish also has been promoting this fact lately due to their new Serious Member paid membership. Serious Members must take the chemistry and personality test to qualify. Hardware wise, we learned that Plenty Of Fish uses 3 web servers, 5 messaging servers and 5 database servers. Their database of user information is 200 GB. For the year the total cost to operate is only a couple hundred thousand dollars with the majority of the money spent on bandwidth.

For information on some of the dating sites mentioned here, read our eHarmony review and our Perfect Match review.

Since the start of the global recession, online dating services in the United Kingdom have grown 13 percent (September 2008 - February 2009). A total of 5 million singles from the UK are now using dating sites. This is 13 percent of the total UK online population. Genders are split evenly and heavy use members were online an average of 4 hours per month viewing and average of 23 pages a day. 65% of UK online daters are 35 or older. The most popular dating site in the month of February was DatingDirect (owned by Meetic, 1.6 million visitors), followed by POF (with 1.4 million) and then Match.com (1 million visitors).

Read NewMediaAge for more information on the story. Visit our DatingDirect review , our POF review and our Match.com review for more information on these dating sites.