General News

This story seems to have slipped under the radar.

On September 14, 2010 Lavalife announced a partnership with Yahoo. Lavalife is now the exclusive dating site for Yahoo! Canada. When users click on "Personals" listed under "Yahoo! Sites" on the Canadian Yahoo homepage they will receive a unique co-branded online dating experience in both English and French. Visitors will not only be able to create a profile on Lavalife, visit the different relationship communities, and communicate with members but, they will have easy access to Yahoo and their services through an extra toolbar that has been added to the Lavalife dating site.

Yahoo also has a similar partnership with Match.com in the United States (see Story).

To find out more about this popular Canadian dating site, please check out our review of Lavalife.

The day after Boxing Day, eHarmony will be offering a free communication event for 7 days in both the United States and Canada. The event runs from December 27, 2010 to January 2, 2011. All members well be able to communicate for free with the guided communication process and no credit card will be required. eHarmony Mail, viewing of members profile pictures and Fasttracking the communication process are not included in this promotion.

eHarmony is a great online tool for finding a partner. A recent Harris study shows that in the United States on average 542 members of eHarmony get married every day. This adds up to over 98 thousand couples in one year which is almost 5 percent of all US marriages. (see Story)

This free communication event will be eHarmony's 32nd. The last one occurred at the beginning of this month (see Story).

For more information on this popular matchmaking dating site, you can read our review of eHarmony.com.

While Justin Bieber is trending on Twitter, what's trending in the world of online dating?

According to the Google Barometer Blog, mobile dating is the newest trend sweeping the U.K. Bickey Russell and Elizabeth Song, Senior Industry Analyst and Analyst Intern, respectively, for Google UK, studied the rising popularity of mobile dating and found that "the volume of Google searches on mobile devices related to dating grew by 215% YoY ['Year Over Year'] since 2008" in the UK alone. And, in an even more remarkable turn, "the volume of dating queries on mobile phones shot up ten fold in just three years' time."

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent, the usage of mobile devices - and the constant Internet connectivity they provide - to access dating websites to search for potential matches and answer messages from interested members has become more and more popular. The market is so large, in fact, that Juniper, a market research firm, has estimated that "the overall mobile dating sector will grow to $1.4 billion worldwide by 2013." That's right - $1.4 billion in just three years. Google research has also found that searches from laptops and desktop computers for "mobile dating" and "text dating" have grown over 72% YoY in the UK.

So what can on-the-go online dating do for you? New interactive features are being invented constantly, allowing you to take advantage of countless new online dating opportunities like proximity dating, which uses GPS or Bluetooth technology to alert users when other singles are nearby. Mobile and location dating also introduce a real-life context into the online dating scene, "making the process less detached from users' everyday lives, social networks, and gathering places."

If you're interested in trying mobile dating, you don't have to venture far outside your comfort zone - many major dating sites, like Match, eHarmony, and JDate, have mobile apps available for download. If you're ready for something new, however, check out these popular apps:

1. Meet Moi: Meet Moi is a location-based mobile dating app that updates your location in real-time and alerts you when a match is nearby. Their basic service is free.

2. SpeedDate.com: Members can search through millions of profiles and start conversations via email with prospective matches. SpeedDate provides an advanced set of filters that allows users to search based on specific criteria, as well as a tagging feature that ensures that favorite profiles are saved.

3. Grindr: Grindr is the largest location-based dating app for gay, bi, and curious men. Grindr is free, and has about 600,000 users per month (about 250,000 users per day, who log on approximately eight times within a 24 hour period!).

4. Zoosk: Zoosk won the award for Best Mobile Dating Site at the Internet Dating Conference this year, and is consistently a #1 dating app in the iTunes Store. The app has all of the functionality of the website, with a GPS location tagging feature.

For more information on the service which won the award Best Mobile Dating Site, please read our Zoosk review. For other dating sites which also offer their services over a phone, check out our Mobile Phone Dating category.

Think Facebook is just a way to network and reconnect with old friends? If so, you're mistaken. According to a new study by Seventeen Magazine, among the younger crowd, Facebook is an important tool for measuring relationships and the most popular way to keep tabs on love.

The study shows that Facebook plays an important role in how young people make a connection, which is a good indicator of how dating will evolve. For instance, when meeting a new person, 79% of people surveyed will "friend" the new acquaintance within a week, and 60% will stalk their crush's profile once a day. And contrary to popular belief, 72% of those surveyed said that talking to someone online brings you closer to them IRL (in real life).

But Facebook is not all about budding love and friendship, as we suspected. About 10% of people surveyed claim they have been dumped over Facebook, and another 10% admitted to dumping their significant others by changing their Facebook relationship status. That's harsh.

Some other interesting findings:

• People judge a date's potential based on Facebook, especially girls. 43% of girls would decide not to date someone based on their Facebook profile, compared to 33% of guys.
• In general, people like to talk about their relationship status, which may work against you if you decide to break up down the line: Only 17% of guys don't share their status, and fewer girls--12%--don't share theirs.

The study was conducted among 10,000 people aged 16 to 21.

Before last week, I hadn't logged into PlentyOfFish for a couple of months. When I did log into POF the other week, I was notified of some new profile question that had recently been added. There were some mandatory questions that needed answering as well as some optional ones.

Mandatory profile updates included a question about my income level and a question about what was the longest relationship I had been in. With the income level question, if you do not answer it then your picture will not appear in "My Matches" and other areas of the site. So basically, if you do not answer it, don't expect people to be able to find you on POF. They say the income question is used to help in matchmaking but it is also used by POFs ad system to display ads to you depending on your income level.

Other new profile questions which are used in POFs relationship chemistry predictor (I believe), are ones about if your father and mother are still together and married, and the birth order of you and your siblings.

To find out more about this dating site, please read our Plentyoffish review.

According to OPW, Lavalife was sold on November 30th, 2010 to First Media Group. Peter Housley who was the CEO of Lavalife from 2000 to 2003 and who is the President and COO of First Media Group will be regaining the CEO title of Lavalife.

For more information on this popular Canadian dating site, read our review of Lavalife.