Dating Services

A dating site for singles 50-plus called OurTime.com was launched the other day by People Media. People Media is owned by IAC which also owns the popular dating services Match.com and Chemistry.

OurTime.com launched with over 1 million profiles in its database. These profiles were gathered from some of IAC's existing dating sites that had singles which matched a number of criteria, including being over the age of 50. Combining all of these profiles into one dating site makes OurTime.com one of the larger services online to cater this niche.

Singles visiting OurTime.com can expect the members to be more interested in long-term relationships and companionship rather than marriage. Members tend also to be more traditional in their thinking and much happier with their personal lives when compared to someone younger.

For more on this story you can read the press release. At the moment we do not have a review of OurTime.com but for a similar dating service you should check out our Senior People Meet review.

Update: Our new review of OurTime.com is now available online.

According to the blog "Breaking the online dating sound barrier”, the dating site Plenty Of Fish only accepts users from Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. I did try creating a new user from China and I didn't have any problems (I had the account deleted), so POF must check the IP of the user to see what country it is from before they allow them to register.

The other bit of news about Plenty Of Fish is, it now supports 4 languages. Before now the site was only available in English. As of a few days ago French, German and Spanish versions can be accessed with an Italian version coming soon. This means any text from the user interface (menus, links, etc.) along with all help and information pages are available in the language. The only thing that doesn't get converted is any text a user may have typed for profile fields like the About Me section.

For more information on this story you can check out Fernando's Blog and to find out more about this dating site you can read our Plentyoffish.com review.

Does where you meet your spouse make a difference in how happy the marriage is and if the relationship lasts?

According to a marriage study conducted for eHarmony in December of 2010, online dating is currently the 3rd most popular way for newlyweds to meet (following work/school and friends/family), and eHarmony is now responsible for nearly 100,000 marriages per year in the United States. Bringing couples together is an admirable occupation - but it doesn't mean much if the relationship isn't built on a strong foundation that can stand the test of time. In the words of eHarmony's Dr. Gian Gonzaga: "my colleagues and I aren't doing our jobs correctly if all we do is bring people together.... It's not about creating a lot of relationships; it's about creating a lot of good relationships."

With that idea in mind, Gonazaga and his team asked themselves the question posed at the start of this post. Does where you meet your partner have an effect on how happy you are in your relationship, and whether or not the relationship lasts? After failing to find any studies that investigated the matter, Gonzaga and his researchers decided to take matters into their own hands, in conjunction with Opinion Research Corp.

RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION

The first study, an online survey of 7,386 adults who married within the last 5 years, examined relationship satisfaction. Participants were asked how they met their spouse, and were then directed to use the Couples Satisfaction Index, a well-known test developed at the University of Rochester, to measure their relationship satisfaction. eHarmony users scored well: couples who had met on the site were more satisfied with their marriages than couples who had met on Match.com, via friends or family, or at a bar or other social gathering. Couples who had met on eHarmony also reported higher relationship satisfaction than those who had met through their jobs or at school, but the difference was much less significant.

KEEPING THE SPARK ALIVE

Participants in the study were also asked if their relationship had "lost the spark," as a loss of chemistry between partners is often a precursor to relationship dissatisfaction. Once again, people who met on eHarmony fared well: couples from the site were least likely to feel that the magic was gone from their relationship.

But what about the major issue of divorce? Does how a person meets their spouse have any relation to the likelihood that they will get divorced? eHarmony researchers asked people whether they or their spouse had ever seriously suggested separating or divorcing, and it turns out that the "proportion of couples who discuss divorce doesn't differ widely across the various ways couples met." eHarmony couples were the least likely to discuss divorce, but the numbers were not statistically different from couples who met at church/place of worship, work/school, and through family/friends. There were, however, "statistically significant differences between the eHarmony couples and those who met at bars/social events and those who met on Match.com."

Talking about divorce is, of course, only an indicator of divorce - it is not a divorce itself. To get a clearer picture of the link between divorce and the location where couples met, eHarmony conducted a second study. Read on to hear more about what they found.

For more information on the dating site which conducted this survey please read our eHarmony.com review.

Yahoo! has partnered with Zonacitas.com a leading Latin America dating service. Currently Zonacitas.com has 400,000 registered users from Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico. With this partnership Zonacitas.com expects more exposure thanks to being Yahoo! Argentina's official destination for online dating. Look for Encuentros on ar.Yahoo.com for the link to the dating service.

To find out about Yahoo's dating partner in the US you can read our Match.com review.

Well, it has been complained about for years and now Plenty Of Fish has finally done something about it. Last week their redesigned dating site went live.

As far as I can tell the content hasn't really changed, they basically re-skinned the dating site (like adding a new theme in a WordPress site). The color pallet has not changed much, we still have the turquoise blue color as the main color. The use of color has improved in my opinion though with the text and titles in colors that complement the turquoise. The header has also shrunk significantly on the site. Gone is the tag line "Free Online Dating" and the little fish image logo which is replaced by just the title "PlentyOfFish".

The new theme does give Plenty Of Fish a more professional, modern and sleek look. I think they made a mistake and created the header to small and they should have included a logo. Without some sort of logo, I feel the site will lose a bit of its identity which is something you do not want to do in the competitive world of online dating.

One thing I wish they did update was the displaying of the thumbnail of the profile photos. Plenty Of Fish still stretches those images when viewed in a search. I understand the need for a uniform size but I think this could be accomplished by just shrinking the image based on the height and keep the width proportional. If the width of the image is still too big they could then crop it to the correct size.

Here are two snapshots of Plenty Of Fish. The one on the left was taken today and the one on the right is from August 2010.

To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our review of Plenty Of Fish.

Do all races prefer to date within their own ethnic group? And what does that mean for the dating world?

OkCupid's research into the racial bias and racial composition of its members found that white members of the online dating site prefer to message other white users. This preference might be intentional, or it might not. It might be caused by a racial bias - conscious or unconscious - or be a result of the fact that white members outnumber users of other ethnic backgrounds on the site. One thing, however, is clear from OkCupid's research: "Given equal choice, every race strongly prefers itself." The data looks like this:

Preference For Own Race vs. Random Individual Of Another Race

• Whites: 2.9x
• Blacks: 4.3x
• Latinos: 4.2x
• Asians: 11.5x

White members actually prefer themselves the least, in comparison to other ethnic groups, but they represent such a large percentage of the online dating population that it's impossible for white users to avoid connecting with other white users unless they are content with dating pools that are much, much smaller.

To see what would happen if circumstances were different, if another race outnumbered whites 19:1, the OkCupid team ran a simulation in which Asians were the dominant group, and all other users were in the minority. Under those circumstances, Asian users would send messages to other Asian users 98% percent of the time, and would also be the most popular message recipients for users of all other ethnic backgrounds (White senders: 74%, Latino senders: 71%, Black senders: 66%). Insularity, according to OkCupid's findings, is common across all cultures.

This insularity, Christian Rudder notes, becomes especially clear when you take a look at cities with larger non-white user bases. As their numbers increase, members of minority populations tend to become increasingly inward-looking. In the 150 cities with the most black users, black members send 2.5% more messages to each other for every 1% increase in the black population. In Baltimore, for instance, 1 out of every 5 users is black, but half of the messages from black users are sent to other black users - a rate that is more than twice what would be expected.

The hypothetical scenarios Rudder and OkCupid created for this experiment will not be hypothetical for much longer, and soon much of this data is likely to become reality. According to the Census Bureau, white people will no longer be the majority in the United States by approximately the year 2050, although that projection doesn't necessarily mean we have a post-racial future to look forward to. Even with increased equality amongst races, OkCupid's research indicates that "people still like to date someone who looks like they do," so that "even when white people aren't the majority, society will be as divided as ever."