General News

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.

The owner of Match.com and Chemistry, IAC, reported their second quarter financials for 2010 today. Over all the search and dating company saw growth increase by 18 percent to $402.9 million when compared to $340 million from Q2, 2009. This increase beat analysts’ estimates by well over $20 million.

IAC owned dating sites brought in $97 million in quarter 2 this year which is an increase of 10 percent over quarter 2 in 2009 ($88.3 million). Removing acquisitions not available in Q2 2009 (People Media and Singlesnet) revenue grew by 4 percent domestically.

A big thing to happen in quarter 2 was Match.com on Yahoo! Yahoo decided to close their own dating site and instead allowed Match.com to be the exclusive provider of online dating on the Yahoo Network.

For the complete public financial IAC Q2 2010 report read this page. For more information on the dating sites owned by IAC, read our Match.com review and our Chemistry review.

Related Story: Match.com First Quarter 2010 Financials

I heard about this movie being made a couple of months ago but this is the first time I have seen a trailer for it which was released on July 15th. The movie is titled "The Social Network" and it is based on the founders of Facebook and the trials they faced making the social networking website what it is today. The leading actors in the movie include Jesse Eisenberg (from Zombieland) who plays Mark Zuckerberg, and Justin Timberlake who plays Eduardo Saverin.



The movie's expected release date in theatres is October 1st, 2010 for North America.

For more information on The Social Network, you can visit the official movie site.

Dating Sites Reviews would like to welcome our new Blogger, Elyse, to our website. She is a dating coach from New York and enjoys studying how attraction works as well as what is needed to create a successful relationship. Elyse will be contributing regularly to our Dating Advice and Tips topics bringing her expert knowledge to bear.

You can already find some of Elyse's dating articles online now which you can find available here.

If you have a dating or relationship question, or topic, for Elyse to cover in a future article you can contact her here. For more information on Elyse you can read her Bio page.

Almost 2 months ago Zoosk reported that their Facebook Fan page had over 1 million fans. I checked today and they currently have 1,612,923 Facebook Fans. Here is a YouTube video that Zoosk put together to mark the milestone.

That certainly is a large number of fans and the increase of 600 thousand fans in under 2 months is an achievement itself (that is roughly 10,000 Facebook Fans a day). This is by far the largest number of Fans any dating site has on Facebook. Two other popular online dating sites only have about 6,000 each.

For more information on this popular dating site, read our review of Zoosk.com.