General News

eHarmony here in the United States will be having a free communication weekend (FCW) starting this Friday May 28th, 2010 and ending in the late evening of Monday May 31st, 2010. As the name suggests, free communication weekends allow free members of eHarmony not only to create a profile and review matches, but to use the guided communication process to communicate with other members. This guided process allows matches to ask and answer questions so they can get to know each other better. In the fourth step, once you become more familiar with you match you can then go ahead and write your first mail message. eHarmony has found this communication approach greatly increases the chances of a successful long term relationship. Fasttracking the communication process to mail and profile photos are not included in this promotion for free members.

This FCW is happening on the Memorial Day holiday weekend so you can expect eHarmony to be the place online for singles who are serious about finding a long term relationship, to be.

This will be the 25th eHarmony free communication weekend with the last event occurring late in March (see Story). eHarmony waiting almost 2 months before having this free communication weekend.

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular matchmaking service.

Singles interested in the United Kingdom Free Communication Weekend, read this eHarmony News Story.

Singles interested in the Canada Free Communication Event which is 10 days long, read this eHarmony News Story.

I knew change was a foot on Yahoo! Personals.

I was visiting the site this morning and all was normal and then just a couple of hours ago we were sent official word that Match.com is now the exclusive online dating site for Yahoo in North America. We had hints of this possibility back in May of 2009 when the CEO of IAC (owners of Match.com), Barry Diller mentioned that they were in talks with Yahoo about acquiring their personals service. Yahoo and Match are also no strangers to partnerships. The dating sites for Yahoo UK, Germany, Taiwan are all partnerships with Match.com in Europe. Granted the Match.com European Operations were bought by Meetic last year but these partnership deals were in place long before the sale. It also looks like the partnership with eHarmony that Yahoo Australia had is over with Match.com taking the helm.

For current members of Yahoo! Personals, you will be experiencing a transition period. You have 3 options to choose from:

Markus, the CEO of Plenty of Fish, posted on his blog with word that they have updated their Chemistry Test. They now use a new and more advanced predictive statistical model which now will give you a list of 30 matches that you are most likely to end up dating and falling in love with. He mentions that they spent year's collecting dating from POF members of who they dated, who they broke up with, and who married. With this information in hand, Plenty of Fish used it to create a model which generates better matches than before for the average user.

As with the older test at Plenty of Fish, the new Chemistry Test still measures 5 dimensions of personality. They are Self-Confidence, Family Orientation, Self-Control, Social Dependency and Easygoingness. These factors were determined by POF to be essential for building a successful long-term relationship.

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

The Match.com blog had an update the other day about their CEO, Greg Blatt, being a guest on the Martha Stewart show.



This is the first time online dating has been a topic on the Martha Stewart show. The short interview focused on the recent study Match.com did of 11,000 people about online dating. They also talked a bit about Greg's brother who is now engaged with someone who he met on Match.com. It took his brother about a year to meet his ideal match. On the other hand, the finance of the brother found him right away since he was only her second communication with a member of Match.com

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

Quepasa.com is a social network website with over 13 million members that services the Latino online community. According to Compete their traffic has increased 5 times to 275,000 unique visitors a month, over the last 6 months. Last week an announcement was made that Quepasa has partnered with the dating site Zoosk to make their service for singles the primary option to all of Quepasa members. This partnership benefits both companies. It gives Zoosk a large, new, and relatively untapped singles market and it gives Quepasa an additional revenue generating service.

Members of Quepasa can expect the dating service from Zoosk to go live by the end of this month.

To find out more about the dating site you can read our Zoosk review.

Has anyone spotted the new and first TV commercial for the dating site Zoosk? Apparently it has started to air in a few US test markets. Instead of being a serious commercial about online dating like we see from Match.com and eHarmony, Zoosk has decided on humour to promote their dating service. I think the commercial will work well for their target market of twenty and thirty something singles.

Here is the new TV Ad from the Zoosk YouTube channel:



I also notice of late that Zoosk is promoting their website over their Facebook App. It looks like they want their website to be the main focus. This is a smart financial decision by them since relying on a third party (aka Facebook) as your main supplier of members is usually a recipe for disaster. Case in point, I know Facebook hurt a lot of businesses on their network (including Zoosk) when they removed application notifications from Facebook member news feeds.

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