General News

According to Date Daily, Mate1.com has launched their 1st annual video contest called "Inglourious Daters". All interested participants need to do, to enter this contest is, make a video about their online dating experiences.

There are a total of 7 prizes:

• 1 Grand Prize of $1000
• First place ($500) and second place ($200) in 3 categories. The categories are "Most Romantic", "Most Popular/Viral" , and "Funniest".

A panel of Mate1.com dating experts will decide the winning videos from the contestants entries based on their viral strengths and entertainment value. The contest will run from March 10, 2010 to June 20, 2010 and is open to people 18 years of age and over.

You can find out more information and rules about this contest on Mate1's Facebook page found here. For more information on the dating site itself, read our review of Mate1.com.

eHarmony will be having a 4 day free communication weekend (FCW) starting this Thursday March 18th, 2010 through to Sunday March 21st, 2010. This promotion will be available on both the United States and Canadian eHarmony dating sites.

These free weekends are a great time to join eHarmony to try out the service. As a member during a free communication weekend you will get to review all your matches and communicate with them at no cost. This enables you to try out most features of the site for free, including the guided communication process and emailing, and all without a credit card. These weekends are notoriously busy for eHarmony so they are great way to quickly meet some new singles in your area who are interested in a long term relationship.

This will be the 24th eHarmony free communication weekend with the last event occurring on Valentine's Day (see Story). During this promotion FastTrack and viewing members photos are not available to free members.

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

Facebook is estimated to have earned $635 million in 2009 and is expected to earn $1.1 billion in 2010 (see Story). Most of Facebook's revenue comes from performance advertising on their site and by selling virtual gifts.

A lot of companies rely in part on Facebook with some relying solely on Facebook as either a platform for their service, or as their marketing tool. The Guardian wondered aloud how much this whole economy is worth. They conservatively estimate it at several billion, but they also ask an important question. Can the Facebook economy continue to be viable, or is it a bubble that may burst sooner than we think.

In my opinion Facebook has done remarkably well. While they haven't been big earners in the past, they certainly have become a big part of a lot of people's lives. Facebook is popular with everyone from teens to business professionals and it's most important feature is, it allows people to make real connections. As long as people continue to do this, Facebook will prosper. Plus, with companies like Microsoft backing them, their continued desire to improve their technology, and with the popularity of services they offer to other websites like Facebook Connect, I am sure Facebook will be around for many years to come.

For information on a dating service which is part of the Facebook economy, read our review of Zoosk.

The dating site Plentyoffish.com can now be found in another music video. The first time this happened was for a song called "Available" by Flo Rida last summer (see Story). Now the Lady Gaga video for the song "Telephone" (featuring Beyonce) has Plentyoffish.com being used by one of the women guards in the video.

The dating site is not the only obvious product placement in the video. You will find Lady Gaga getting her Verizon mobile phone confiscated by jail guards and strangley enough, her eating Wonder Bread in the video as well.

You can find the new video LadyGaga.com. Warning the video is a little strange and has sexual content.

We noticed that eHarmony has shut down eHarmony Marriage. eHarmony Marriage was launched on February 6, 2006 as a service to help couples fix a struggling marriage. As of November 2009, eHarmony had removed all links to eHarmony Marriage on their dating site and as of last week, the domain "marriage.eHarmony.com" now gets redirected to eHarmony Advice.

eHarmony Marriage was an interesting concept that I guess didn't take off. At one point back in December of 2008 we notice that eHarmony Marriage only had about 1,000 visitors a month (see Story). This number is not large, especially when you consider eHarmony the dating site receives millions of visitors a month.

The main way I found eHarmony promoted the marriage service was through the dating site itself. If a user picked "separated" or "married" as their current relationship status when filling out a profile, they would then be asked by the website if they would like to learn more about eHarmony Marriage (see Story). With the closure, I guess if a marriage has reach the point of someone searching dating sites for singles, it is beyond the point of them wanting to fix the marriage.

eHarmony is not out of the marriage business all together. In 2008 they bought the popular websites Weddingbee (see Story) and Project Wedding (see Story).

For more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review.

We previewed this online dating study about deception back in December of 2009. The study has now appeared in the March 8, 2010 issue of the "Journal of Social and Personal Relationships". From an article at U.S. News we learned that the study gathered data by surveying 5,000 online daters from the United States who were interested in establishing a long-term relationship. Beyond what we already reported earlier, we further learned that people who use dating site are no more honest (or dishonest) than when dating in real life.