Dating Services

California Superior Court Judge Ann Jones rejected eHarmony's attempt to dismiss a class action which deals with discrimination against gays. The jury trial is set to start February 1, 2010 and will take place in the Superior Court in Los Angeles. The Judge found that eHarmony had not presented any law that allowed the company to refuse to serve gays and lesbians at their main eHarmony dating site. The lead plaintiff in the class action is graduate student Nate Cardin. He attempted to use eHarmony in 2006 and when he could not and asked why, he received a form letter explaining that eHarmony is only for heterosexual relationships. Nate filed a class action in 2007 and is represented by the civil rights law firm of Schneider Wallace Cottrell Brayton Konecky LLP and the Law Offices of Jeremy Pasternak.

eHarmony did recently disclose that they had received over 3,000 email complaints from people who had visited eHarmony to find a relationship with someone of the same sex but was denied service. Previously eHarmony had made a deal with the New Jersey Attorney General and had opened up the dating site Compatible Partners to serve gay singles (see Story). This class action argues that eHarmony does not give "equal treatment of patrons in all aspects of the business".

The social dating site Zoosk, with its widely popular Facebook application has reached a member base of over 40 million people. Last month the Zoosk dating website combined with its Facebook application had 12 million unique visitors.

Zoosk was launched back in 2007 and has grown strong recently on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5 and BeBo. With Zoosk creating a dating profile is much easier than other dating sites as it will pull information from any of the social networks you are using. Zoosk's target audience is 25 to 35 year olds who are looking more for a short term casual relationships. Zoosk offers a premium subscription for $25 a month. The site also has a virtual currency called "Zoosk coins" which allows members to buy virtual gifts and other subscription upgrades.

Zoosk expects to end out the year with $18 to $20 million in revenue and it is currently experiencing a $30 million run rate.

For the full story, read TechCrunch. We also expect to have our in-depth Zoosk review up soon for both the dating site and the Facebook Application.

In March, Chicago Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart sued Craigslist for allowing pimps and prostitutes to use their classifieds service (see Story). Since then Craigslist has faced mounting bad press about their Erotic Services category and the famous "Craigslist Killers" which used their site to stalk their victims. With the mounting legal troubles Craigslist has changed the requirements to post an ad in their Erotic Services category. Users must now pay a fee with a credit card and provide a working phone number.

Last week Craigslist caught a break, U.S. District Judge John F. Grady dismissed Tom Dart's request to force the web site to eliminate its erotic services category. The federal judge stated that Sheriff Dart cannot sue Craigslist for the conduct of its users.

For more on the story, read NBC Chicago and to find out more about this classifieds website, read our review of Craigslist.

The American Association of Retired Persons or AARP, is the largest organization for people 50 years and older in the United States. AARP recently announced that they have a new love and relationships expert, Dr. Pepper Schwartz, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington and has more than 35 years of experience in researching love and relationships. Dr Schwartz is also Perfectmatch.com's relationship expert and helped oversee the design of their automated matching system.

As part of her new duties at AARP, Dr. Schwartz will be writing a weekly online column called "The Naked Truth" at the AARP website which will cover a number of topics related to relationships, love and sexuality. She will also contribute to other online resources with videos, online chatting and blogs. This content will be both for educational and instructional purposes.

To find out about the dating site Dr. Pepper Schwartz is associated with, read our review of Perfectmatch.com.

The free dating site DownToEarth.com was officially launched in January 2009 by IAC, the parent company of Match.com and Chemistry (see Story). Down To Earth's target market was the College-aged crowd of 18 to 25 and their goal by the end of the year was to have 250,000 members. Well, it looks like they didn't make it. OPW reports that the dating site DownToEarth.com has been relaunched as Stir.com.

DownToEarth.com reached their traffic peak in March at almost 250 thousand unique visitors, since then the dating site's traffic has fallen by over half to 96 thousand unique visitors in September:

Free dating site OkCupid recently did several studies about online dating emails, looking at over a million of their members. They took a look first at the words that people wrote to one another and how those words correlated to response rate. (Here's a hint: Use proper English and not netspeak if you want replies.) But probably their most controversial article related to how your race determines the amount of replies you will receive.

We all want to assume that people are a lot more colorblind than they used to be, but OkCupid has found that's simply not the case. Even if we say that race doesn't matter, the numbers don't lie - it really does.

OkCupid's CEO, Sam Yagan, told NPR's Michel Martin that they were intrigued by the idea that they could get some answers to the questions people have about the role race plays in online dating. After all, when people are asked to state their dating preferences in their profile, they check off certain boxes. Do those boxes match up to the emails they deem worthy of a reply?