General News

The Online Dating Insider found a site that sells dating profiles to other dating sites. Apparently they have over 6 million profiles with pictures from 170 dating sites that they own. Not to be out done, there is another service which allows you to buy Facebook Friends/Fans and Twitter Followers if you want as well.

This is why you need to research a dating site before you join. No one in their right mind would want to join a dating site that is filled with profiles that were purchased and are not directly connected to real people.

In a surprising move the torrent site, The Pirate Bay has partnered with the dating site company Meezoog. This partnership has produced the dating site called PirateDate.com. The Pirate Bay is the largest file sharing website (Bittorrent tracker) in the world and has been targeted several times by legal teams to be shut down. I guess to protect their business and profits, The Pirate Bay has decided to enter different internet industries.

The new dating site has an ad on The Pirate Bay that is displayed on the top left hand corner. Visiting the Pirate Date homepage you are greeted with an image of a sexy pirate chick (what else should I call her?). While the connection between dating and pirates doesn't fly with me and I have problems seeing the attraction of this concept with women, how the actually dating site works is intriguing. According to the site, Pirate Date is about sharing your single friends with other members by using Facebook Connect. This circle of "social trust" is supposed to weed out the scammers that plague other dating sites, since member's friend's vouch for each other. You can also date members with up to 5 degrees of separation from their friends.

I see 2 problems to this approach though. First is the ability to pimp your friends on a dating site without their knowledge. I am not sure how happy I would be if I started getting communication from people from some dating site I never signed up for. Secondly, unfortunately Facebook is not immune to scammers. You can buy Facebook friends online pretty cheap now days.

For more information on this story, read the press release.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post, more online daters are turning to "ghostwriters" or virtual dating assistants to help with their search for love.

Online dating can be time-consuming. Between answering questionnaires, searching through profiles, and emailing back and forth, the process can seem overwhelming. Some daters can't stomach the pain of rejection, where emails are ignored or rebuffed. Enter the dating assistants.

For $600 a month, Atlanta-based company Virtual Dating Assistants will comb through profiles and send flirtatious yet generic messages to dozens of potential matches on your behalf. The steep price however only guarantees 2 dates per month. In addition, their ghostwriters are paid only for "positive responses" received from potential dates.

And how do the ghostwriters elicit positive responses? After interviewing the client for basic personality guidelines, they write messages using a "charming and flirtatious" persona. According to one ghost writer, "he's witty, a bit aloof and not over-complimentary. He includes a question or subtle challenge." Apparently, this persona gets the most responses from women.

Some daters have found the service helpful, in that they aren't dealing with continual rejection and have found more women responding to their profiles. Others claim that it's helped them streamline the dating process so their time could be spent in other ways besides examining dozens of profiles and sending out mass emails.

While virtual dating assistants do provide benefits to their clientele of online daters, I have to consider the women and men on the other side of the scenario. What about the people these clients date? Personally, if I found out that my date wasn't really emailing me or even choosing me out of the online line-up, I would be a little insulted.

Online dating sites provide us with more options than ever for meeting new people, which means we spend more time searching, as well as enduring more rejection. But dating in person involves a lot of time and rejection until you meet the right one. No amount of outsourcing is going to change that.

Lavalife has recently updated the design of their dating site. Gone is the old HTML framed based site (I was shocked they kept it around for so long) and in, is a new more modern look using current technologies like AJAX. This means that web pages do not have to load as much and most tools are now updated right on the screen. For example you can open the Lavalife Instant messenger on the bottom communication toolbar without reloading the page and it will stay open as you surf around the site. The email message indicators for each distinct community (Dating, Relationship and Intimate) are also now located on the bottom toolbar next to the IM window which makes it easier to see when and where your new messages are.

The profile detail view has been redesigned with a new tab interface that keeps all the information organized on one page. The profile thumbnail photos are also larger, not only in this view but in the search results as well. The only thing I didn't really care for was the text profile information in the search results. Instead of being organized in specific locations, the information is displayed one after the other in a paragraph. This makes it difficult to scan the search results quickly and compare the information of each profile since the profile information may not appear exactly in the same spot for each search result.

The one other thing I notice was that Lavalife Speed Dates is currently offline as the Lavalife developers continue to update that part of the website.

For more about this dating service, read our review of Lavalife.

Last week JDate officially announced the launch of JDate Mobile in Beta. JDate Mobile is compatible with any web enabled phone, including all of the smart phones like the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. When you sign up for JDate Mobile you will get instant text alerts when:

• You receive email or some other form of communication.
• Someone views your profile.
• If you get added to someone's Hot List.

These text alerts are free to all members. Current subscribers of JDate will also be able to send and receivie email messages right from your phone.

For more information on this dating site, check out our review of JDate.com.

We heard that OkCupid has sent some emails out to their better looking members letting them know that they have been placed higher in the search results because of their attractiveness. They will also be matched with other members of similarly rated attractiveness.

Say it isn't so OkCupid!

For a dating site which prides itself on its unique way of matching singles through the use of quizzes, this approach makes OkCupid seem more like a hook-up site instead of a dating site which values real relationships. Obviously attraction plays a role in relationships but to automatically push a profile higher because of how well a photo is rated seems one-dimensional.

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