Dating Services

I've noticed a few comments lately on our site (see Comment) from visitors about chatting on PlentyofFish (and Dave's blog post as well). This was a bit of a surprise to me since back in April 2009 IM was dropped without notice, much to the dismay of many members (see Story). Well, I had time to confirm it tonight, and it does indeed look like the old instant messenger is back.

The reason given for the removal of the IM functionality initially was that it reduced the page impressions on POF by 10% or more. The reason for this was people were chatting and not surfing the site (and clicking on ads). I guess all POF needs to do now is update their Help FAQ since it still says "Plentyoffish doesn't have an IM.".

For more on this dating site, you can read our review of PlentyofFish.com.

Match.com in Australia (Match.com.au) has been in operation for 15 years now. They launched back in April of 2002 after buying out Soulmates Technology. To celebrate this milestone they have released some Aussie statistics about Match.com:

• More than 80,000 profiles are viewed every day.
• Everyday 16,000 winks and messages are sent. This equals to 6.5 million communications a year.
• 67% of Australian singles have never been married.
• 59% of members are looking for a non-smoker.
• 90% of members are okay with a partner who drinks on occasion.
• Gold Coast members are 45% more likely to have children than those members from Sydney.
• 64% of men are looking for a partner who has some tertiary education. With women it is 71%.

To find out more information about this dating site, read our review of Match.com.

The other eHarmony dating sites had their free weekend at the end of May. eHarmony Australia is celebrating theirs this weekend. Starting today, Friday June 11th and until Monday June 14th, 2010 eHarmony Australia (eHarmony.com.au) is having their free communication weekend. During this time all members of eHarmony Australia will be able to communicate with each other at no cost (with no credit card required). This 4 day event is happening during the Queen’s Birthday holiday which makes it ideal for singles to try out the dating site as it will be extra busy this weekend. Fasttracking the guided communication process and profile photo's are not included in this promotion.

The last free weekend at eHarmony Australia was 4 months ago on Valentine's Day. Check out our eHarmony review for more information on this popular Australian dating service.

The Australian website Smart Company did an interview with the vice president of international marketing at eHarmony, Sean Cornwell. In the interview he was asked several questions which resulted in him giving us some new information and statistics about eHarmony in Australia.

eHarmony.com.au was launched in November 2007. In those 2 years, the matchmaking site has had over 650,000 single residents of Australia register. In the first quarter of this year (2010) they saw 123,000 additional people create profiles on eHarmony Australia. Part of the huge growth this year is due to a bigger marketing budget. By late 2009, eHarmony felt they had enough Australian members in which they could properly promote their service through the media.

eHarmony offers singles a chance to receive high quality matches. Singles who sign up to eHarmony will receive between

five and a maximum of seven compatible matches every day.

These matches offer the best chance for a relationship to develop, but it is still up to members through communication to see if there is any sparks or chemistry between them. eHarmony believes it is more important to receive quality matches than to receive a large number of matches that have little chance of creating a successful relationship.

For more information about this dating site, read our review of eHarmony.

Glamour Magazine has partnered with the online dating site Match.com. This is a good move for both companies. Of the roughly 3 million women who visit Glamour.com, 70 percent are single or divorced. This is obviously an ideal market for Match.com to offer their service too. Plus a large percentage of Glamour readers are between the ages of 20 and 50. This age range is the prime users of online dating sites. From this 2 year deal Glamour will receive a percentage of the revenue from people who sign up for this Match.com extended dating service called Glamour Matchmaker.

When singles log into Glamour Matchmaker they will find specially chosen profiles which are organized by personality types. These personality types will be created by the staff at Glamour and will include names like "Adventure Seeker" and "Foxy Bohemian".

Glamour Matchmaker is expected to go online sometime this month.

For more on the story, read The Wall Street Journal. To find out more about the dating site which partnered with Glamour, check out our Match.com review.

Lavalife has recently updated the design of their dating site. Gone is the old HTML framed based site (I was shocked they kept it around for so long) and in, is a new more modern look using current technologies like AJAX. This means that web pages do not have to load as much and most tools are now updated right on the screen. For example you can open the Lavalife Instant messenger on the bottom communication toolbar without reloading the page and it will stay open as you surf around the site. The email message indicators for each distinct community (Dating, Relationship and Intimate) are also now located on the bottom toolbar next to the IM window which makes it easier to see when and where your new messages are.

The profile detail view has been redesigned with a new tab interface that keeps all the information organized on one page. The profile thumbnail photos are also larger, not only in this view but in the search results as well. The only thing I didn't really care for was the text profile information in the search results. Instead of being organized in specific locations, the information is displayed one after the other in a paragraph. This makes it difficult to scan the search results quickly and compare the information of each profile since the profile information may not appear exactly in the same spot for each search result.

The one other thing I notice was that Lavalife Speed Dates is currently offline as the Lavalife developers continue to update that part of the website.

For more about this dating service, read our review of Lavalife.