Dating Services

Recipient
Lavalife

It was no contest this year for the Editor's Top Pick - Canadian Award. The dating site, Lavalife, continues to be the choice for singles in Canada and it's easy to find out why. Join for free and do a search for singles in your area. You will find many online and many more who visit the dating site regularly. The thing with Lavalife is finding out when a member was last on is easy. You can tailor searches by online activity, plus this information is displayed right in the profile summary of search results. You never have to wonder if the person you are sending a message to on Lavalife is an old member who doesn't use the site anymore. A lot of dating sites tend to hide this information since it can show how many inactive profiles they do have.

The other big deal with Lavalife is they allow free members to reply to paid members messages. This means as a paid member you do not have to worry about sending a message to a free member as with other popular dating services like eHarmony. If you don't get a reply to a message, you know this is because most likely they are not interested. Not because they do not want to pay for the dating service.

Lavalife is divided into 3 distinct dating communities based on relationship types. So it doesn't matter what type of dating service Canadians wish to join. There are communities for singles with casual dating in mind, or singles who wish to have a serious relationship or for those who want an intimate encounter. These are 3 services for the price of one.

Read our review of Lavalife for more information about this dating service or visit Lavalife directly.

This Years Runner Up for this award include (in no particular order): Date.ca and Canadian Personals.

The economy is in reverse but online dating site Match.com is speeding ahead. They had their largest membership growth for November in 7 years. Match.com started 13 years ago in 1995. According to a press release Match.com attribute the growth to:

The combination of a new matching service, the Daily5, and the daily drumbeat of bad economics sent consumers to Match.com looking for love.

Match.com members initiated over 400,000 more connections this November (when compared to Nov 07) thanks to in part the new Daily 5 feature (see Story). November also produced the third busiest week of the year. Usually the weeks in January and February leading up to Valentine's Day see the heaviest use of dating sites.

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

Instead of launching Chemistry in the United Kingdom (which is available only in the US and Canada) Match.com has decided to include a personality test called Match Insights as part of the UK Match.com dating site. After reviewing the 2 tests I found them almost exactly the same (at least with the way I answered the questions). For existing Match.com members you can find the personality test in the My Profile section. According to the press release about this news:

... the self analysis is available free to all match.com online dating members in the UK. This will be followed by a premium service available early next year which will deliver every ’match insights’ user their best matches each day based on their personality type.

It looks like this will become an additional paid service that will most likely continue to be a part of Match.com instead of becoming a whole new dating site.

Recipient
Match.com

Once again Match.com is the winner of the Editor's Top Pick - Over All, Award. This is the second year in a row for Match.com and, there are good reasons for this.

• While not as strong a pick as last year due to only marginal growth of members this year in North America, Match.com offers the largest number of high quality profiles by far. Internationally, Match has lept a head due in large to successful partnerships with a number of popular websites in South America and Europe. International members get a modified version of the dating site from North America. They tailor profile questions and searching criteria depending on what is important to singles in these countries and/or cultures.
• Match.com continues to innovate. Starting from last December, examples of this are; Match My Friends with testimonials, their foray into Facebook with the Little Black Book, the profile service MatchStudios, expanded cell service for Match Mobile, the Insiders Guide, and the Daily 5. Not everything was a success (The Little Black Book comes to mind) but they are one of the few dating sites to consistently offer their members major new features.
• Website design and interface improvements. Match.com's recent website redesign and their interface tweaks through out the year continue to improve usability. Their web interface offers new members a simple to use layout that doesn't get confusing, while still offering more experienced members the control they require over searching and profiles.

Match.com offers members a premium dating service. This has been their business for 13 years now, and year after year they have consistently been the dating site to join. People who choose Match.com will get the online dating tools required and access to one of the largest membership pools of singles looking to find their potential partner.

Read our review of Match.com for more information about this online dating service or visit Match.com directly.

This Years Runner Up for this award is: eHarmony.

In the beginning of the year we took a look at a new Facebook application called the Little Black Book from Match.com. We were not overly impressed but, felt it did hold some promise. Being maybe a few weeks old at the time, the Little Black Book had 67 daily active users with about 600 total installed users. Our main complaints involved around the clunky user interface and browser compatibility problems.

A month later, David from the Online Dating Insider took a look at the application as well. At this time there was 240 daily active users. While not impressive numbers for a Facebook application, it was an improvement from when I had looked at it. In his review, David had a wish list of improvements and found the browser issues were still present.

Flash forward 11 months and the Little Black Book has disappeared from Facebooks application list. The last appearance I can find of it is a Google Cache page which was capture September 29, 2008. At this time there was only 100 monthly active users with a 1.6 out of 5 star rating. The reviews of the application were not pretty.

Did Match.com take down the application to redevelop and fix its problems or is it gone for good? I think it is in Match.com's best interest to forget about Facebook applications. A search for the term "Dating" on Facebook revealed that the most popular application has over 12 thousand active monthly users. Not a lot when you consider the 1.3 million paid users Match.com website had this past quarter. Match.com employees time would be better spent on other projects.

An article on The Wall Street Journal website reviews the negative side of eHarmony settling the New Jersey anti-discrimination complaint (see Story). The complaint was about same sex matching not being available on eHarmony.

Some eHarmony customers feel

that homosexual activists have succeeded in taking a private business hostage. Why should eHarmony have to serve every type of clientele? Do Jewish dating sites have to serve Christians? Can meat-eaters demand a hamburger at vegetarian restaurants?

These are all good points but are they relevant counter points in this same-sex matching case? It wouldn't really make sense for a Christian to join a Jewish dating site. The site is designed with the Jewish faith in mind and the members who joined it obviously want to find a partner who is Jewish and makes their religion an important part of their lives. If a Christian did join the site, there wouldn't be much there for them, plus there are plenty of Christian dating sites they could join instead. A popular Jewish dating site, JDate, doesn't allow you to select Catholic as your religious background but you can select "Willing to Convert" or "Will tell you later". I don't see this as discriminatory, towards Catholics, as there are plenty of Catholic dating sites to join. If there wasn't then, maybe it would be a different story. An extreme example of this type of thinking, would be going into a Jewish Synagogue and demanding they allow other religions to practice there.

This is a slippery slope. You shouldn't discriminate against race, age, sexual orientation, gender and religion. The question is what is not going far enough and what is going too far? Should we start cracking down on businesses that offer seniors discounts or ladies nights? I don't think so. Should eHarmony have offered same-sex matching? Probably...

Check out the full story at The Wall Street Journal.