General News

Everyone's either tried it or seen it on TV:

The date's not going the way you'd planned, so you quickly send a sneaky text to a friend begging them to rescue you. A few minutes later they ring your phone, you pretend it's an emergency that requires immediate attention, and you dash off before your disappointing date can register any objections.

It's a good plan, but what if you can't reach a friend in time to rescue you from certain dating disaster? Thanks to eHarmony, there's now an app for that. With the free iPhone app, aptly named "Bad Date Rescue," you can arrange for downhill dates to be interrupted by phone calls from fictional characters. You can even program the app to make it appear as though any of the contacts in your phone, accompanied by their photo, is calling you.

Bad Date Rescue will call at a pre-scheduled time or via an emergency prompt from you, then, using a pre-recorded message, pretends to be your mom, your boss, or a neighbor who needs your assistance asap. Your mother, who has a thick Dakota accent, needs a little help figuring out one of her more complicated technological gadgets. Your boss needs a hand in the office right away. Your British neighbor is calling to inform you that something catastrophic has happened to the plumbing in your house, and "it's running down my walls!"

If interacting with the pre-recorded message sounds like a stretch of your acting skills, eHarmony offers an alternative "Repeat after me" option. In case it wasn't clear by the name, the app tells you what to say and how to say it (e.g. "frantically"), then praises your expert delivery of the line (I guess that after school improv class back in high school really paid off!).

And just when you think the Bad Date Rescue app has become a kind, generous, and helpful new friend, the recording scolds you for making poor dating choices, lecturing you about how - if you'd used eHarmony in the first place - "you wouldn't be in this mess." Who do you think you are, Bad Dating App? You don't get to tell me what to do.

"eHarmony developed the Bad Date Rescue App as a fun and engaging way to help people get out of a bad date and into a good date," spokeswoman Whitney Standring-Trueblood said.

"Fun" it certainly is. Just be sure you don't crack up mid-call and totally blow your cover.

For more information on the dating site which brought you this app you can read our review of eHarmony.

We just updated our Chemistry.com dating site review and it is now available online. It has been almost 2 and half years (very bad on our part) since the last major update to the review. We usually try to do a major update to the reviews at least once a year and then do minor updates as we come across any new information about the dating site (i.e. price changes, new features, etc.).

So what has Chemistry updated with their service since the last time we did a review? Here is a quick list of the major changes:

• The look and feel of the site has been updated with a more modern look
• The new Stream feature has been added that allows you to see what your matches are up to
• The personality test questions has been modified
• Membership costs have decreased across all subscription levels

To find out more about this matchmaking site and the changes please read our updated Chemistry.com review now.

If you’re into outdoor activities and a more organic experience when it comes to meeting potential love interests, there’s a new concept that took place at a farm recently in Boise, Idaho called “weed dating.” Before you chuckle and roll your eyes, it’s not what you think. This is a speed dating event that involves doing work on a real farm – not a recreational activity. In fact, the hostess of the event herself claims she’s not an event planner or a matchmaker, but just a farmer.

Weed dating is a form of speed dating, except that instead of taking place in a bar or restaurant at night, it takes place on a farm under a sunny sky in the middle of the day. And instead of sitting across from each of your dates trying to come up with things to talk about, you are doing farm work beside each other – specifically, pulling nasty weeds out of the ground so that vegetable and fruit plants can grow properly. The hostess provides instruction to everyone – from how the rotation of couples works (the women stay put while the men rotate every three minutes) to how to discern the weeds from say, a zucchini or tomato plant.

While this is a pretty strange concept, it does provide a way for like-minded people to meet. Most of the participants have been outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists, gardeners, and activists. While there are niche online dating sites that cater to these groups specifically, some prefer to meet in a more organic way that through an online dating site, so this provides another option.

As one participant stated in an interview with Associated Press, “What I find is if you go to bars, you don't really know what people's interests are. You can't really walk into a bar and complain about climate change or peak oil without having people look at you weird. That would probably scare off a lot of people.”

This wasn’t the first weed dating event – they’ve also taken place in Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio. More than 40 participants showed up at the event this year in Boise, compared with only 20 last year.

I don’t expect this to become mainstream like online dating or even regular speed dating, because it’s really geared to certain types of individuals (and ones who live relatively close to farms), but I’m always intrigued by the new ways people develop opportunities to meet others. And if you’re open to trying something new, why not? It gets you outside, allows you to feel like you’ve accomplished or learned something, and there’s always a chance that someone interesting might show up.

To find out more about a popular online speed dating service you can read our SpeedDate review.

Everyone knows that online dating is popular, but just how popular is it? The Wall Street Journal decided to investigate the phenomenon, to figure out exactly how web-based American love lives have become.

"One result of the increasing importance of the Internet in meeting partners," says an article published on the 'How Couples Meet and Stay Together' survey, "is that adults with Internet access at home are substantially more likely to have partners, even after controlling for other factors."

In 2009 and 2010, a research team asked a group of over 4,000 participants (including couples who'd met as long ago as 1940!) how they met their partners. They found that almost all traditional ways of meeting people - like school, church, and mutual acquaintances - are in decline:

• The number of heterosexual couples who met through friends dropped from nearly 40% in the mid-1980s to less than 30% in 2010.
• From 1960-1990, neighborhood and church meetings accounted for 10% and 7% of romantic partnerships, but both numbers dropped after 2000.

At the same time as those figures were declining, the proportion of couples who'd met online was on the rise. From the mid-1990s to 2010, the number rose from 0 to just over 20%. Bars and restaurants, always popular choices for romantic meetings, maintained steady popularity, becoming even more influential after 2000.

The online dating revolution has been an even greater boon for same-sex daters. The numbers of homosexual daters who met online rose to more than 60% by 2010. Other dating markets who have fewer chances of meeting potential partners in real life, like older singles, have also found online dating to be hugely beneficial.

But the facts and figures may not be as simple as they seem. "Answers to the 'where did you meet?' question could be multiple," notes the WSJ article. "It could be that online daters were taking note of their real-world encounter."

With the exception of couples who met before the Internet era, people without an Internet connection were significantly less likely to be in a relationship than those with access to the Web: 36% vs. 72%. The authors are quick to point out, though, that the numbers cannot be taken at face value. Survey participants who did not have Internet access at the outset of the survey received Internet access, meaning that those who "lacked" it actually only lacked it when the survey began.

The authors also caution that there is no way to be certain that technology is the causal factor in their findings. There is no evidence that online dating has affected the proportion of people finding partners over time - displacement of old methods of partnering up seems to be what the researchers observed.

It looks like True Beginnings (aka True.com) is seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They filed in Texas Federal court last week along with the owner Herb Vest. According to the filings True.com owes between $50 and $100 million to their creditors in amounts up to $10 million.

True.com claim to fame was their stance against married people and criminals joining their dating site. According to True they screen all members against a United States criminal database before they are allowed to communicate on the service. They also state on their homepage “TRUE reserves the right to report violators to appropriate law enforcement …”. Violators would be married people who report themselves as single and people who say they have no criminal record when in fact they do. Violators could be accused of fraud since they potentially violated the True.com Privacy and Use Policies.

For more on this story you can check out the Dallas Business Journal.

Facebook's IPO is one of the biggest news stories of 2012 so far...are you up to speed? Here's an overview of the most important details of the IPO, from promising start to disappointing finish.

After abundant speculation and much anticipation, Facebook finally filed paperwork for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012, the same week the massive social network celebrated its 8th birthday. The S-1 revealed that Facebook had an estimated value of $100 billion and was hoping to raise $5 billion dollars, which would have made the company about four times as valuable as Google when Google went public in 2004.

Facebook filed with Morgan Stanley as lead underwriter, while Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and others took secondary positions. Shares were planned to hit the market in May 2012, but rumors soon began to fly that the IPO wasn't living up to the hype. Investors were skeptical about Facebook's prospects, as the site's ad revenues hadn't kept pace with its user growth. An investor poll conducted by Bloomberg found that 79% of investors, analysts, and traders thought that Facebook's $96 billion valuation was too high.

Facebook amended the S-1 filing several times, each time painting a bleaker picture of Facebook's future. One of the largest problems facing Facebook was the site's mobile versions. Facebook has yet to find a way to capitalize on its smartphone-based users, so the more users who check Facebook from their phones, the worse Facebook's average revenue per user (or ARPU) gets. Users are increasingly accessing Facebook from their mobile devices, meaning that Facebook's revenue is sinking.

After all the hysteria, the IPO's debut was anticlimactic. On its first day as a public company, Facebook's stock closed at $38.23 a share. That's down from the opening trading price of $42, but up from its IPO price.

Many theories attempt to account for the IPO's disappointing performance. One suggests that it's NASDAQ's fault, for failing to the stock until 11:30 am EST, 30 minutes later than planned. Another theory places the blame with GM, which pulled its advertising from Facebook shortly before the IPO because it wasn't working. Others say that Facebook was overvalued, or that investors are now weary of social media stock.

Whatever the reason, the rocky IPO cast doubts for many on Facebook's second-quarter revenue potential, and the doubts continue. After all the rumors and hype surrounding Facebook's IPO, what was billed as one of the biggest stories of the year became a non-story. There was little to tell, except that Facebook had underperformed.

In the weeks following the IPO, Facebook stock fell as low as low as $25.52. It is now around $28, but its future is still uncertain.

To find out if this social network can be a good way to meet new people for dating, please check out our review of Facebook.