Dating Services

Just in time for Valentine's Day, eHarmony here in the United States and Canada is planning to have their 23rd free communication weekend (FCW) starting Thursday February 11th, 2010 to Monday February 15th, 2010.

During this 5 day eHarmony free communication weekend, all members will be able to review matches and to communicate with these matches for no cost. The month of February and especially around Valentine's Day is when dating sites are the busiest. This means if you haven't tried eHarmony yet, this is your best chance to see how it works and what type of matches they have in your area. As with previous FCWs, members will not be able to FastTrack the guided communication process. Member's photos also are also not viewable for this promotion.

The last eHarmony free communication event occurred during New Years Eve (see Story).

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on the dating site.

Singles interested in the United Kingdom Free Communication Weekend, read this News Story.

Update: I see that the Australian eHarmony dating site is having a FCW as well but it runs from Friday Feb.12th to Feb. 15th.

Match.com and Meetic have created an equal partnership together in Latin America where the two dating companies will be combining their resources. According to the CEO of Match.com, Greg Blatt:

By combining ParPerfeito's strength in the Brazilian market with Match.com's presence in the rest of Latin America, we believe we're best positioned to drive that expansion and create an asset of meaningful value. We're confident from our work together in Europe that further partnering with Meetic will be a productive experience.

The online dating market is less mature in Latin American than the larger North America and Europe markets. By making a combined push now both companies feel that they will come out ahead in this merging dating market. Match.com will control the new entity's operations and will pay Meetic $3 million in cash at the closing (March 15, 2010). I am not sure what Meetic's responsibility in all this is but, I will assume that they must be required to push traffic to the new venture. At the beginning of the fourth year of operations Match.com has reserved the right to buy Meetic's share of the entity at fair market value.

When we receive more news about this new entity (like the name of the website) we will be sure to pass it on.

For more on the story read the press release.

Match.com currently offers their dating application on the iPhone (see Story), the Palm Pixi (see Story) and the Palm Pre (see Story), or so I thought! While researching a story about the Google Android OS I see Match.com now offer a dating application for the Blackberry phone. As with the other Match.com smart phone applications you can browse for singles, send and receive emails and wink at members. Blackberry App users can also upload photos and edit their profiles. These smart phone apps for the most part allow you to do everything you can on the website. As far as I can tell the Blackberry Match.com dating application was released sometime late January, 2010.

We also just got news that Match.com is currently working on a dating application for Android phones. Once this app is completed in the coming months Match.com will have almost 90 percent of the world's smart phones covered with their dating application. When you combine this with their current matchMobile service (which has been around for a number of years now for regular cell phones) you can tell Match.com has taken a special interest in mobile dating.

For more on the story read Forbes. To find out more about mobile dating applications on Match.com, read out review of Match.com.

It's Just Lunch recently shared their survey about dating plans and dating etiquette for Super Bowl Sunday. Here is what the matchmaking service found out:

• 58% of singles say that they would bring a first date to a Super Bowl party.
• 74% of men and 82% of women stated that they will root against their date's team at the Super Bowl party.
• 65% of men and 72% of women will not stick to their diets during the game.
• Don't talk about anything except football. 52% of singles would try to turn the conversation back to football and if they persisted in non football talk, then 31% of singles would never ask them out again to a sporting event.
• If you had a ticket to the Super Bowl, 46% of men would prefer to bring a date rather than their best friend to the actual game. For women it was 37%.

For the full story read the press release and for more information on the matchmaking service which sponsored the survey, read our review of It's Just Lunch.

The winner of our Editor's Top Pick - Christian Award for 2009, ChristianCafe.com, has recently updated their dating service. Due to members requests this dating site has added additional options to the 'Children at home?' question on their dating profile. In addition to 'Yes' and 'No', members can now select 'Sometimes' and 'Weekends'.

ChristanCafe.com also have added a new question to their profile which asks members if they are willing to relocate. Answers to this question includes 'Yes', 'No' and ' Possibly'. Existing member's answers will default to 'Possibly'. Of course, existing members can always update the answer by editing their profile. This new field is also searchable when you are looking for matches.

The last new update is the 'Who's Viewed Me' list is now editable. This means if you don't want others to know you've viewed their profile, you can now remove entries from their 'Who's Viewed Me' lists. This is done on the Profile Settings page which is accessible from the Profile menu.

To find out more about this dating site, read our [staticpage: review of ChristianCafe.com]

The 2009 Editor's Top Pick - Senior Award goes to SeniorPeopleMeet.com. This up and coming dating service has become quite popular with senior singles. SeniorPeopleMeet.com receives over half a million unique visitors in a month and over 1000 new members' sign up every day. Plus, 66 percent of all members are 50 years and older. No other dating site dedicated to senior singles even comes close to these impressive statistics.

SeniorPeopleMeet.com is a dating service which is easy to use for internet savvy singles as well as those who are new to the online dating world. Their free profile signup process takes under 2 minutes and once you have logged into the dating site, it doesn't take long to become familiar with how the dating site works. All the dating tools you will need to search and communicate with potential matches are available on the left column of the website, including your inbox, searching and community tools. Once you have logged on, click on "Search Profiles" and perform a search of singles in your Zip Code. The result will be a long list of high quality profiles made by real members.

With over 1300 submitted success stories of happy senior couples who met on SeniorPeopleMeet.com, this dating site is an ideal spot for any person 50 years or older to find like minded singles to date.

Read our review of SeniorPeopleMeet.com for more information about this dating service or visit SeniorPeopleMeet.com directly.

This Year's Runner Ups for this award include (in no particular order): Lavalife Prime and Senior FriendFinder.