General News

Dancing, music, humor, and organized fighting.

These 5 things are the interests that appear most frequently on OkCupid's list of the stuff Latino men like, a part of their newest study of online dating trends. The importance of music and dancing to the culture is clearly exhibited by both the men's list and the women's list: the terms "merengue," "bachata," "reggaeton," "musica," and "salsa" appear in both lists, always in the first half. Latino men also appear to have, in Christian Rudder's words, "an interest in telling you about their sense of humor" and "an interest in industrial strength ass-kicking." "I'm a funny guy," "comedy," "very funny," and "outgoing and funny," make the men's list of most-used words and phrases, as do "boxing," "Marines," "MMA," "UFC," and "law enforcement."

The interests of Latina women are, for the most part, exactly what you would expect from an online dating profile. Family is mentioned ("familia," "family-oriented," "mom's"), as are friends ("amigos," "my girlfriends"). Career and schooling make appearances as "education," "medical field," "my B.A." and "social worker." Movies, music, and physical appearance are also important ("Sixteen Candles," "Juanes," and "mascara"). Latina women break the mold, however, with "I'm terrified of," a phrase which appears at #42 on their list. OkCupid's team delved further into that unusual phrase, and discovered that the words that typically come next are "insects" and "the dark," "though one expert tautologist is 'terrified of being scared' and another woman is 'terrified of Martians.'"

Simplicity dominates the lists for Asian men and women. "I'm a simple guy" occupies the second spot on the men's list, while "I'm a simple girl" takes the third spot on the women's list. Asian men are also careful to mention their specific heritage in their profiles. "Taiwan" is the #1 term on the men's list, with "Korea," "Singapore," and "Korean" following in the 3rd, 5th, and 7th positions. Food ("pho," "a foodie," "sashimi") and sports ("cricket," "tennis," "badminton") are important to Asian men, but not as important as education and occupation. "Freakonomics," "mechanical engineer," "an engineer," "entrepreneur," "analyst," "Malcolm Gladwell," "finance," "accountant," "pursuing my," "investing," "electrical engineering," "investment," and "currently studying" all make the list.

Asian women also describe themselves as foodies (with a particular interest in "chocolates," which is #2 on their list), but show an interest in cooking the food as well as consuming it ("Food Network," "Anthony Bourdain," "new recipes," "cooking and baking," "cookbooks"). Like the women of every other culture, Asian women enjoy music ("Jason Mraz," "Michael Buble," "Norah Jones") and movies ("Slumdog Millionaire," "Sleepless in Seattle," "A Walk To Remember"), but what really makes Asian women stand out is their worldliness and urge to explore. "Different places," "different cultures," "trying out new things," and "my passport" appear on their list but, with the exception of a couple of overlaps with Asian men, not on any other lists.

Rudder does not provide commentary on the lists for Indians, Middle Easterners, and Pacific Islanders, so join us next time for a breakdown of the final 3 cultures and a look at effectiveness of the study.

On September 15th, 2010 SpeedDate.com announced that they had reached 10 million users. SpeedDate is different than other dating sites because their main focus is to connect singles in real-time via internet video chat and mobile phones (with an iPhone application). Members go on five minute online dates to determine if chemistry exists between them. These short dates puts the emphases more on communication and less on the dating profile. Other popular mainstream dating sites tend to work the other way around. This is the first time that a speed dating site has reached the 10 million member mark.

For more on this story, read the press release. To find other related dating services, you can check out our Speed Dating reviews category.

According to StuffWhitePeopleLike.com, white people are into:

• Ray-Bans

• The Ivy League

• Dinner parties

• Studying abroad

• Expensive sandwiches

• Whole Foods

And according to OkCupid's newest study, " The REAL 'Stuff White People Like,'" white people are also fond of the Red Sox, NASCAR, boating, and proving how country they are.

Prompted by questions like "What is it that makes a culture unique?" and "What tastes, interests, and concepts define an ethnic group?" and even "Is there any way to make fun of other races in public and get away with it?" the research team at OkCupid examined the profiles of 526,000 randomly-selected users and separated them into groups based on their self-stated race. They then analyzed the text in each profile, and "isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group's essays statistically distinct from the others." Using the data they collected, the OkCupid team attempted to uncover "the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself."

Their findings are divided not only by ethnicity, but also by sex, and are arranged in the form of word clouds that indicate the frequency with which each word or phrase is used. White men, it appears, are big fans of the works of Tom Clancy - his name was the phrase most frequently used in their profiles, followed by "Van Halen," "golfing," "Harley Davidson," and "Ghostbusters." "The mind of the white man," writer Christian Rudder cheekily comments, "is the world's greatest sausagefest.....there is not even one vaguely feminine thing on his list, and as far as broad categories go we have: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias." As you might expect, movies, television, sports, and motorized vehicles all feature prominently in the white man's word cloud.

White women are also interested in sports and motorized vehicles, it seems - 3 of their top 5 terms are "the Red Sox," "boating," and "NASCAR" (in fact, NASCAR appears higher on the women's list then on the men's list!). Chick-flicks, music (especially country), exercise, and make up and clothing make appearances on the list as well. "It's also amazing," Rudder notes, "the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms."

Next, Rudder examines the "stuff black people like." Black men showed concern for their appearance and attitude, using phrases like "I am cool," "tall, dark, and handsome," "calm," and "laid-back guy" to describe themselves. Black women exhibited strong interest in music ("gospel," "Alicia Keys," and "neo soul" were the 4th, 5th, and 6th most-used terms, respectively), church, and The Color Purple, which was the second most frequently used phrase.

The number one term on the lists for both men and women is "soul food," which appears to be very important for both sexes but even more so for women. Soul food and black women, Rudder mentions, was the single strongest phrase/group pair that the OkCupid researchers discovered. Religion also appears powerfully in both lists. Though it was not among the top phrases for any other race, 13 of the top 50 phrases were religious for black men and women, meaning that "black people are more than twice as likely than average to mention their faith in their profiles."

Up next: we review Rudder's data on the stuff liked by Latinos, Asians, Indians, Middle Easterners, and Pacific Islanders, and evaluate the accuracy of OkCupid's study as a whole.

Facebook was down yesterday morning for about 2.5 hours. From around 9:30 AM eastern standard time to about 12:00 PM most people reported not being able to access Facebook. Most received a DNS failure message similar to this one:

Service Unavailable – DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

This was Facebook's longest outage in about 4 years and was the result of the database being overwhelmed by requests. This was due to a new software update that handled certain error conditions. The software update incorrectly found an invalid configuration value when someone connected to their Facebook account. This error would result in numerous queries to the database. When you times the number of database queries by the number of people who use Facebook everyday worldwide, this error quickly brought Facebook's database servers to their knees. The problem also compounded itself because, if the same person tried to visit Facebook again, the whole process would start over again.

To fix the problem, Facebook's engineering team had to shut down the site. Once the database servers stopped receiving requests the reason for the problem was discovered and then fixed. Once completed, Facebook then slowly allowed people back on the site and monitored the situation closely. The system that checks for errors in configuration values is turned off at the moment. Engineers are going over new designs for the system to make sure this problem doesn't happen again.

For more details on the problem Facebook experienced, read Robert Johnson Blog.

Features on dating sites come and go quite regularly as the dating companies test the market to find out what their members want. I have been updating a number of reviews recently and notice that Lavalife has removed their online speed dating feature. Lavalife first introduced speed dating last summer and in little over a year it has been removed from the dating site. I guess in the end, not enough singles used speed dating to warrant the feature.

Speed dating may have been removed from Lavalife but the "Online Party" feature has taken over. Online parties are scheduled real-time chatting events that actually have a lot in common with speed dating. With speed dating you are required to chat one-on-one with every single member at the event and then tell Lavalife if you wanted to communicate further with anyone. With the Lavalife online party, you can pick and choose who you want to enter a private chat with.

To find out more about this dating site, read our review of Lavalife.

Here is a small bit of news regarding Zoosk.

According to the WSJ, Zoosk.com plans later this year to start matching singles based on their tastes in music, movies and books. This update to the matching system is in response to a survey Zoosk did of its members that found 57 percent of people found it a turn-on if someone else liked the same books as they did. Zoosk also confirmed that common shared interests like those of movies, music and books are great topics for initiating a conversation.

To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our review of Zoosk.com.