General News

We are a little late letting you know about Chemistry.com's free weekend in May. It started yesterday (May 13) and goes for 3 days and ends at midnight on Sunday May 15, 2011. Chemistry free weekends allow all members to communicate at no cost. Since members already are able to create a profile and receive matches for free this means that this weekend is the best time for singles interested in finding a long-term relationship to try out Chemistry, and all without having to use your credit card.

The last Chemistry free weekend was in March (see Story). To find out more information about this matchmaking service, please read our review of Chemistry.com.

Last month Jiayuan.com applied to list on the Nasdaq. Well, on May 11th Jiayuan.com (China's largest dating site) opened for trading under the symbol DATE at $11 per share. At one point it reached $11.62 a share but by end of trading it had fallen 4.4 percent to close at $10.52 per share. As of writing this post one share of the company is worth $10.68 US dollars.

From the IPO Jiayaun said they raised $78.1 million from 7.1 million American depositary shares.

For more on this story you can read .

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.

eHarmony UK released a survey in April that they had conducted which showed that 92 percent of British newlyweds lived together before they got married. Of these couples more than a 33 percent had lived together longer than a year. In comparison about 10 percent of couples lived together before they got married in the 1980's.

50 percent of the people polled who were married less than a year said they had spent at least some time apart (due to relationship troubles). This number drops to 20% for those who had been married much longer. It was also found that 38 percent of the people new to marriage had already been raising kids together. For those who married more than 25 years ago this percentage is only 9.

The survey by eHarmony in the United Kingdom polled 1035 married people. 530 of them had been married for less than a year and 505 of them have been married for more than 25 years.

I am not surprised by this survey as here in North America I am sure that statistics about this topic are pretty much the same. All of my friends who have married within the last 10 years have lived with their significant other before they got married. To find out more information about this dating site for British singles, please read our eHarmony UK review.

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.

We are hard at work finishing up our new dating site comparison tool that will allow people who search for dating sites to also make a side by side comparison by checking off 2 or more dating sites and then clicking the compare button. On a new page, the sites will then be listed vertically along with all of the attributes we track for each site. These attributes include number of members, costs, features and all whole bunch more (about 30 in all). We hope to have this up in running in June.

In the next few weeks we also hope to have our Facebook and Twitter account login integration finished which will allow users to log into Dating Sites Reviews using these accounts. Most people have one or both of these accounts so we figured it makes sense to support them. Plus, when you create an account here your user information, Bio and picture will automatically transfer over from Facebook or Twitter once you give permission.