Online Dating

The Financial Times is reporting that China's largest online dating site, Jiayuan.com, has applied today to be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol DATE.

As we reported in November of 2010, Jiayuan.com plans to raise $100 million with this IPO.

It's Just Lunch in the San Francisco Bay Area is offering their clients a new option for a membership. It is called "Private Search Membership". Along with the traditional matchmaking services that the single will receive when opting for this membership, matchmakers at It's Just Lunch will actually broaden their search beyond the members of It's Just Lunch and search the entire Bay Area to find a suitable and quality match for the member. Along with the Private Search Membership, members will also receive date coaching.

For more information on the story you can read the press release and to find out more about this popular matchmaking service, please check out our It's Just Lunch review.

The OkTrends blog has already taken a look at "How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get" and "The REAL 'Stuff White People Like,'" and now the OkCupid research team is at it again, this time taking on the subject of race by examining race relations in America and asking the question: What if there weren't so many white people?

"Since most thinking about race hinges on the fact that one particular race predominates," writes Christian Rudder, "what if, using statistical models, you could make that predominance disappear?" Currently, white members receive more messages than non-white members on OkCupid, though it is unclear if this is an indication of their "popularity" or their population. If the world - or at least the users of OkCupid - were more racially balanced, would that statistic change?

To find out, OkCupid ran a study based on 82 million messages sent by members over the course of the last few months. The researchers found that OkCupid is actually less white than the rest of the Internet in America, but they were unable to make direct group-to-group comparisons because Quantcast, the media measurement service that provides their demographics, doesn't provide multiracial data. White members made up 74% of the OkCupid population, followed by:

Other: 13%

Latino: 5%

Black/Asian: 4% each (a tie)

White members also received the vast - and I mean vast - majority of messages sent on the site (a gigantic 89%!). In fact, white members were the most popular message recipients regardless of the senders' ethnicity.

After gathering the basic data, the OkCupid team experimented with their findings, using Asian users as an example. They found that Asian members sent 3 times as many messages to white members as they did to other Asian people. The breakdown:

White: 71%

Asian: 23%

Latino: 5%

Black: 2%

Taking into account the fact that white members outnumber Asian members 19:1, however, the findings can be viewed differently. Rudder rearranges all the ratios from the study and, via a little math wizardry, comes to the conclusion that, if there were an equal number of Asian people and white people on the site, Asian users would actually overwhelmingly prefer to message other Asians. In a world in which the population was not dominated by white folks, in which every user had a completely equal chose, the average number of monthly messages each ethnic group received would be very different.

...but you'll have to tune in next time to find out the details!

To streamline the profile creation process for mobile users eHarmony announced last month that they put together a questionnaire for their profile that can be completed in about 10 minutes. eHarmony's normal relationship questionnaire can take about an hour or so to complete.

The mobile questionnaire has 100 questions that eHarmony has tested and experimented with to ensure that mobile users who fill out this shorter version will still receive very high quality matches. They have also updated the interface to use the touch screen much more effectively with less key strokes or touches. Users question will now auto save as well so they can come back at any point and finish up the questions if something comes up.

The look and feel of the dating app also has changed to make it more personal. The test is now constructed like a book with chapters. To help people answer questions more accurately some of the profile questions also have been re-phrased into first person statements.

To try out this new version (1.4.1) of eHarmony's dating app you can visit iTunes.

For more information you can visit the official eHarmony blog and for more details on the dating service you can read our review of eHarmony.

"Every ten years in the United States we take a census, the purpose of which is to determine how many people live in different areas of our country, so that the makeup of the House of Representatives reflects the makeup of the nation. Along with a simple count of heads, the census asks other questions which give us insight into our income, jobs, homes, ages, and backgrounds. This information is analyzed and published by the government, telling us who we are.

But these facts and figures, interesting and useful as they may be, are not really us."

With that interpretation of the U.S. census, artist R. Luke DuBois introduces his latest project, a piece entitled "A More Perfect Union." In an effort to define Americans more accurately and create his own version of the 2010 United States census, DuBois joined 21 online dating sites - from Match.com to AsiaFriendFinder - and analyzed the profiles of 19,095,414 single Americans. The results are "a road atlas of the United States, with the names of cities, towns, and neighborhoods replaced with the words people use to describe themselves and those they want to be with." The maps contain 20,262 unique words, each of which appears in the location in which it's used more frequently than anywhere else in the country.

DuBois found, among other things, that the nation's happiest people seem to be living on the coasts, particularly in Washington, where online daters in Seattle take the title for most instances of the word "happy" appearing in their dating profiles. The least happy women appeared to be living in New York, in the Bronx, while the least happy men call central and western Nebraska home.

Ladies in parts of Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, and Ohio - and men in parts of Texas, Wyoming, and Georgia - are the most "lonely" in the country. The least lonely women are in Illinois, and the least lonely men have settled in California, around Los Angeles.

Some of DuBois' more scandalous findings trace instances of words like "naughty," "virgin," and "kinky." No one in Wyoming, it turns out, uses the description "naughty" in their profiles, though many women in Colorado do. The highest concentrations of virgin men and women are in New York's 12th congressional district (which includes Williamsburg and the Lower East Side) and Louisiana's 2nd (New Orleans), respectively. New Orleans does, however, come in first when it comes to the least virgin men, an award that went to Houston, TX for the women. If kink is your thing, search San Jose, CA and southern West Virginia, which tied for most kinky women, or New Mexico for kinky men. Kinksters would do well, on the other hand, to avoid Wyoming completely.

Though DuBois doesn't theorize about why certain words are more prevalent in certain parts of the country, his experiment tells us a lot about what it means to date in contemporary America. "Online dating requires a very specific, complex act of self-identity," he told ABC. "If you don't do online dating, you assume everyone says the same thing, e.g. 'I'm nice, cute, smart, fun'.... But it turns out that the real objective of an online dating profile is to stand out from the crowd and get noticed, so people talk openly and honestly about their aspirations, their hobbies, their life history. It's really fascinating."

For 14 days eHarmony Australia is running a free guided communication event starting April 13th and ending on April 26th, 2011. This means starting tomorrow for a fortnight, singles in Australia can visit eHarmony.com.au, create a profile, receive matches, and then communicate with those matches through the guided communication process at no cost.

As winter approaches in Australia it is a good time for singles to check out their local online dating site since this is typically the busy period for dating and matchmaking services.

To find out more about this online dating site in Australia, you should check out our eHarmony review.