General News

Today eHarmony turns 10. To let people know how successful this online dating site is and how easy their members find love they have come up with an advertising campaign called "Love Begins Here". You can expect to see some new television commercials (directed by an Academy Award-winning filmmaker) along with a huge billboard in Times Square. Nearly 50 couples participated in the 8 day shoot in Los Angeles to create these commercials. None of the eHarmony success story couples were paid to appear in the ads.

This ad campaign also marks a new direction for the commercials. You will not see the couples talking about the relationships as in previous spots, instead images and music will tell the story. They hope to reach singles more at an emotional level. eHarmony plans to spend from $25 to $30 million on this new campaign, both online and off.

For more on the story you can visit the NY Times and to find out more about this dating site you can read our updated review of eHarmony.

OKCupid’s official blog, OKTrends, recently sent a powerful warning to its readers:

Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!

The eye-catching admonishment is the title of a post about the site’s latest study, an in-depth technical look at profile photos that forms the perfect follow-up to their previous report on the subject, “The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures” (check out our review of the article here). Instead of merely considering the content of the photos we post, writer Christian Rudder advises, we should also take practical matters like aperture, flash, and focus into account.

The article chronicles the results of a study that aggregated 11.4 million opinions on what makes a successful photo. The experiment was simple: subjects were shown two photographs of different people, chosen randomly from the 552,000 sample user pictures that were collected, and asked which person they would prefer to go on a date with. The information gathered was then compared with data about the photography itself, like the time of day and shutter speed at which the pictures were taken.

The most amusing claim, by far, is that iPhone users have more sex than users of other mobile devices. BlackBerry users came in second place, with Android aficionados bringing up the rear. No word on how much sex Windows Mobile users can expect during their lifetimes (or at least the lifetimes of their cell phones).

In less humorous news, OKCupid’s findings show that the best photos come from Panasonic Micro 4/3s cameras, while the worst come from the cameras on Motorola phones. The next best camera brands were Leica, Canon, Pentax, Nikon, Sony, and Olympus (in that order), while Kodak was judged to be almost as bad as the Motorola phone. Of the camera phones, Sidekick was considered the best, with Apple’s iPhone close behind. Somewhat surprisingly, Android, Nokia, BlackBerry, and Windows phones were all rated lower than phones of less popular brands.

The flash, according to the study, should always be avoided. Subjects consistently assigned a higher attractiveness rating to photos that did not use the flash. Based on their data, the experimenters determined that the flash adds about 7 years of age to the person in the photo (and, consequently, not using a flash can remove 7 years of age from a person’s appearance).

Other findings suggest that the best pictures have “a very shallow depth of field,” which means that the photo’s subject is sharply in focus while the background of the picture is blurry. The article goes on to give a very technical explanation for this effect, and some examples of it, so be sure to visit the source at the link provided below if you’re interested in photography.

The study’s final conclusion is that late night and late afternoon are the ideal times at which to take your profile photo. Rudder “irresponsibly theorize[s]” that this is because “photos taken in the former bracket tend to be more provocative,” while “those taken in the latter tend to be pleasantly lit.”

OKCupid’s findings are certainly attention-grabbing, but do they actually have any value? Tune in next time when we’ll take a look at what the data actually means, and where it might be leading you astray.

Read more about the study here.

With the recent downtime of PlentyofFish a number of members contacted me asking a few questions about the dating site. One of them was:

... can you tell me what happened to the POF Forums/Message Board?

To my surprise, it looked like at first glance that the forums have been removed from Plentyoffish.com. The forums were quite popular on the site with hundreds of posts being added every day. Looking deeper into the problem the person who asked me this question said he found that the forums still existed but the link to them had been removed from PlentyofFish a while ago. He then asked me why? My best educated guess is that the forums were too distracting to members. The owner of POF wanted people to use his dating site where ads are being displayed. The more ads viewed and clicked on by visitors the more money the website will make (this is how most websites and publications make money, including the one you are reading now). Since the forums don't display ads (and therefore do not make money) I figure that is why the link to them was removed. With no link, new members wouldn't find out about the forums and stay just on the dating site while still allowing the older members who knew about the forums to continue to use them.

For those of you looking for the PlentyofFish forums, you can still find them here or, if you like you could try posting in our own dating site advice forums.

While I was checking out the PlentyofFish forum issue I notice that there were a few new features. First off it looks like Upgraded Members (those of you who paid for the Serious Members Badge) now have their profiles displayed to local users at the top of their search results. Originally the upgraded membership was suppose to show your intent to the dating community that you are serious about dating (see Story), that is why it was called the Serious Member Profile Upgrade. As we thought though, this badge has slowly but surely morphed into a full membership upgrade that now even affects the search results. I am not saying this is a bad thing as we knew it would eventually happen, it was just funny how POF didn't originally want people to think they had a paid membership.

A few other new features I noticed included some search options. You can now search for users in a specified zip code who logged in at least once a day. The average user displayed by this search actually logs in 3 times a day to PlentyofFish. The other new search option is a "Will Respond" search. This is supposed to return users who will most likely respond to a message from you if you view their profile. The average user from this search last logged in about 20 hours ago and they are expected to be online again in the next 3 hours. Both of these search options are a great idea!

The last new item I found is a statistic. According to PlentyofFish, every day 1.4 million people use their dating site. In 2009, this number was 900 thousand.

For more details on this popular online dating site, please read our review of PlentyofFish.

I have just started to see some visitor comments being submitted that the free online dating site Plenty of Fish is offline. POF looks to have been experiencing problems for the last couple of hours. The message that now appears when you visit the site is "The service is unavailable". Other visitors have reported seeing Memory errors which looks like it had when POF tried to send some email. Memory errors usually are caused by either faulty software or hardware. I would put my money on this being a hardware problem as I am sure any software used by the dating site is thoroughly tested before going live.

The last time we recorded Plenty Of Fish down was in May and like in other incidents the servers are usually back up and running properly in 5 to 10 hours.

We will update this post when we get more information.

Three days ago a 2.8GB torrent file of data from over 100 million Facebook accounts appeared online. The file was created by Hacker Ron Bowes from Skull Security with a crawler program he wrote. The information contained in this file was not hacked but just contained data that the owners of the Facebook accounts had made publicly available. By doing a normal search on Facebook a typical user would be able to find this information. Still, it is a little scary that someone had gathered and created a separate database with all this information. Recently Facebook has reached the 500 million user mark so just over 20% of publicly available user information was taken.

I notice today that the Skull Security website is down at the moment so either it is overloaded from people looking up information on the torrent file or, Facebook has had their legal team close the website down.

Another interesting point about this story is that Gizmondo found that IP addresses owned by over 60 major corporations were also downloading the file. I wonder what they want with this information? Of course, it may not be the corporation who wants to take a peek at the data but just a curious employee. Here is a partial list of companies who's networks were downloading the file according to Gizmondo:

• A.C. Nielsen
• Apple
• BBC
• Boeing
• Disney
• HBO
• HP
• IBM
• Sony
• Time Warner
• United Nations

If you're crushing on someone from your college philosophy class, now you don't have to approach him in person to see if he might feel the same. More and more college students (and campuses) are turning to GoodCrush.com to make introductions.

The site is set up for users to communicate in an anonymous fashion. A cross between a dating website and Facebook, GoodCrush.com allows students to enter up to five "crushes" at a time, and if there is a match, they are notified in a congratulatory email (names are only given out if there's a match). Also, if you have a crush on someone but don't want to reveal yourself, you can bypass the matching process and send him or her a message directly (no photo or name attached) through the site's messaging system.

The site went live on 20 college campuses in February, and since then 14,000 students have signed up. There are requests from students at 80 more colleges to join.

The growing popularity of GoodCrush.com is not surprising. More people are using social networking sites like Facebook, mobile applications, and websites to find love, or to just hook up. Virtually speaking, it's easier than ever to meet people, regardless of whether or not you're in college.

But more to the point, GoodCrush.com is helping students avoid potential face-to-face rejection. When you have a website anonymously confirm whether or not your crush is interested in you, it's kind of an insurance policy for dating. This makes it a lot easier to date and to meet new people.

Of course, it makes it a lot easier to move on to the next crush, too.