Dating Services

According to Netcraft the social networking giant Facebook had a brief period of outages on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008. The BBC were informed it only affected certain countries. Netcraft found the site unavailable from all of its collectors which are located in Pennsylvania, San Jose, Phoenix, New York, Virginia, Italy and the United Kingdom (London).

No new outages have been reported since Wednesday and the site had now been updated to fix the problem according to Facebook.

Update - The rumor was only partly true. The free weekend is for Canadians only at eHarmony.ca.

I am not sure if it is true but I heard a rumor that eHarmony is having another Free Communication Weekend for the United States and Canada from Saturday June 28 to Tuesday, July 1. This weekend falls on Canada Day (July 1st) and is close to the US Independence Day holiday. The last free weekend at eHarmony was from May 23 to May 26 which was close to Canada's Victoria Day holiday (May 19) and also Memorial Day in the US. Maybe there is something to this rumor after all?

If you where thinking of trying out eHarmony for the first time I would wait to this Saturday so you can communicate with your matches for free. These promotions from eHarmony are usually only for new members who actually sign up on the specified weekend.

For more information on eHarmony, read our review.

The unofficial eHarmony Blog has a post about how she received a free month on eHarmony when she reported several fake profiles after communicating with members who were obviously not who they said they were. Poor english skills and huge inconsistencies where the warning flags.

No matter how hard a dating service tries, scammers are always going to get by the automated and manual checks of the dating site. Part of most dating services defences against scammers is to rely on their members to report them. In most cases people report fake profiles and move on, you never know what becomes of your report. Did the dating site follow up or did your email go straight to the trash bin? It's nice to see a service that acknowledged the problem and rewarded the members work with an additional month.

This is just good business for eHarmony. You don't want an unhappy member to go out and tell their friends.

For more information about this service, read our eHarmony Review.

Recently MillionaireMatch.com has added some new verification services. They already verify if a member qualifies as a Millionaire (if the proper documentation is sent in) and your primary photo, they will now also verify your age and occupation. When a dating site is geared towards matching Millionaires with other singles and assets play an important role, these verification services help both types of members out greatly. The millionaire members gets more activity on the site since his profile information is marked as verified and non millionaires don't have to worry about if the verified members have exaggerated some of their profile information.

I also notice, MillionaireMatch.com now allows guest members (free members) to reply to any gold members emails or instant messaging request. This greatly opens up the site to gold members since they know anyone can reply to their messages and they don't have to just send messages to other gold members.

For more information, please read our MillionaireMatch Review.

Related Story: MillionaireMatch.com New Features

MarketingWeek is reporting that OgilvyOne won the marketing account for eHarmony. I am unsure if this is the entire marketing account for eHarmony or just the United Kingdom part. eHarmony was reported to open a UK specific dating service in June (see story) but that appears to be less and less likely as there is just over a week left this month. Hopefully we will see it by summer's end. I did notice that the domain eHarmony.co.uk is registered but it currently just reroutes you to the eHarmony US site.

For more information on eHarmony, please read our review.

According to several news sources (ABC15.com and AZ Central) the Arizona Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Great Expectations dating service, alleging they misled their customers.

Great Expectations has said the case has no merit. This service has over 30 years of experience in matchmaking and is one of the few dating services which actually meet their clients face to face at one of their offices. They have more than a couple dozen offices spread across the US.

The suit was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court against Sun West Video, Inc which runs Great Expectations for Singles.

The suit is seeking refunds for consumers and financial penalties against the company.

The Attorney General's office alleged that Great Expectations:

• Misrepresented to consumers the overall number of participating members and members in certain age groups.
• Told consumers that two to three marriages occurred among members every month when it had no credible basis for such statements.
• Misrepresented to consumers that it had conducted a criminal background check on all of its members.
• Used high-pressure sales tactics that included sales representatives urging consumers to contact their credit card companies to get an increased credit limit to pay for a membership.
• Showed potential new members written profiles and photographs of people they said were Great.

These allegations have not been proven in court yet but, we have decided to remove this dating site review from our categories for the time being, just to be safe.