General News

I found this TechCrunch article on a new dating site for Apple Fanboys and Fangirls extremely funny. The dating site is called Cupidtino. Here is author Michael Arrington thoughts on this new service:

Apple fans can be annoying when they’re on their own. The thought of them breeding and creating little Apple fans, a whole family of hard core hipster Apple lovers, is just not a good thing. On the other hand, making sure that Apple fans only date other Apple fans is a good way of stopping them from spreading their Apple fan genes to the general population, I guess. So maybe this site isn’t all bad.

I also had a laugh when I read this comment from one of TechCrunch visitors:

Actually, we need to dilute the apple fanboy/girl gene pool by breeding INTO it, as shocking as that may sound. By sacrificing small bits of ourselves, over time, we can eliminate the purity of apple fandom by reintegrating them back into normal society.

I always found most Apple fans take themselves a little too seriously, Good Stuff!!!

The Skout dating application for the iPhone has reached version 2.0 and not only did it get some new features it also got a design makeover. New features include virtual gifts, a game called "Look at Me" which allows you to bid for attention of other members and a Wink-Bomb. The bomb allows members using Skout to reach hundreds of singles in your proximity all at once with location based dating and the GPS in your phone. With the app you can then find out who has been looking at your profile and think you're hot. With this information in hand you can then contact these people to meet up somewhere close by.

If you are interested in trying out Skout for your iPhone here are a few more interesting stats about the dating service.

• Skout was the first iPhone Dating Application
• Skout members send on average 100 messages in 1 month.
• Currently over 750,000 people have used Skout's location based dating option.
• A Skout iPad dating application is currently being developed.

Here is a sneak peek video of the dating app in action:

For a few more details read the press release. Here is our list of other dating sites which offer their services on mobile phones.

I was notified by a user and have just confirmed that the dating site Plenty of Fish is down. I tried accessing the website from a number of countries (using proxy servers) and received a connection timeout error in all cases for both Plenty of Fish domains (www.plentyoffish.com and www.pof.com). It looks like the website has been down for at least an hour now (8:30 am EST).

A connection timeout error with a website usually indicates a problem with accessing the web server (it took too long to respond). This means something probably happened to the internet connection or with the web servers hardware. The last time POF was down for a while was June of 2009. This was due to a power failure (see Story) and resulted in about 8 hours of downtime.

On a related note the owner of Plenty of Fish, Markus Frind just got married last weekend. This may mean he is on his honeymoon and not close to home which could result in Plenty Of Fish taking a little while longer to get up and running again. I expect Plenty Of Fish to be online again sometime late morning or early afternoon.

We will update this post when we get more news. If you have any news please comment on this story.

Update #1: That didn't take too long. PlentyofFish.com is now back online as of roughly 9:58 am eastern standard time.

The Archived tab is a relatively new feature of the eHarmony communication process. When you know you are not interested in communicating with a Match that eHarmony gives you, just click on "Archive this Match" link. The Match will then be moved from your New Matches section too the Archive Tab. There is also a new auto-archive feature that goes along with the tab that will (as the name suggests) auto archive any Match that closed communication with you. These archived Matches will still appear in the Match Updates list if any one of them updates their profile information or photos.

If you find a Match in your updates that you want to reconnect with because the update renewed your interest, eHarmony does allow you to un-archive any Match to continue on with the guided communication process.

If you want to find out more about this dating site, read our eHarmony review.

Match.com revenue for quarter 1, 2010 was down 1% to $89.3 million. In the same quarter last year revenue was $90.1. The acquisition of SinglesNet this quarter and People Media in late 2009 did not quite meet the loss of revenue from Match.com Europe sale to Meetic. Taking these transactions out of the equation revenue for Match.com grew 8 percent. Increase sales came mainly from business in the United States.

Here is the complete IAC Q1 2010 Report For more information on the dating sites owned by IAC, read our Match.com review and our Chemistry review.

Related Story: Match.com Fourth Quarter 2009 Financials

Spark Networks is one of the few dating companies to be a Better Business Bureau (BBB) Accredited business. They have been one since 1999. Being a BBB accredit business means that the:

... BBB has determined that the business meets accreditation standards which include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve any consumer complaints.

Why is belonging to the BBB important? The BBB is an international recognized independent organization that allows consumers to not only voice their own opinions about a company but it also allows them to file a complaint which will be monitored by the BBB on how the accredited business responds. If you check out Spark Networks BBB report you can see the number of complaints they have had in the last 36 months and the type of response which was given. The response of Spark Networks directly reflects their BBB rating. This doesn't mean Spark Networks has to comply with every consumer request but they do need to follow the contract they entered in with their customers or risk receiving a lower BBB rating.