Online Dating

We just got word that eHarmony in Australia (eHarmony.com.au) is having a free communication weekend starting today, Friday October 2nd, and ending Monday October 5th, 2009.

Not only can all members (including free ones) review matches for free but you can communicate with them as well. Just remember if you are a new non paying member, don't use the guided communication FastTrack option. This option is not available for free during this promotion and you would lose the ability to communicate with this member. For those of you who have not used eHarmony before, the FastTrack option allows you to skip the 4 step guided communication process and permits you to go ahead and send a email message right away to your match.

The last eHarmony Australia Free Communication Weekend was held at the end of August (see Story).

Read our review of eHarmony and find out why Australian singles have made this a very popular matchmaking service.

As ladies, we're unhappy with our bodies. We can be honest. There's always that one spot that drives us nuts, no matter how thin or toned we get. However, this is no excuse for camera trickery in your online dating profile. Let the following be a warning rather than a guide:

The Old Picture
We all have the old picture where we looked GREAT! If you don't look like that anymore (be honest!) then you shouldn't have it up in your profile. This goes double if you've gained more than 10 pounds since the picture was taken. Keep those photos for your Facebook - show the current you in your profile.

The Photo From Above
So you're taking current pictures and you've realized that your double chin disappears if you do a self-portrait looking UP at the camera. That's great, but how often are you going to be looking at your date from that angle? Oh what? Never? Ditch the clever photo and own up to how you look from a realistic angle.

Mate1.com’s CEO Liz Wasserman was on the Cyber-Dating Expert Radio Show in August. From listening to the show, we learned several new things. First of all, Mate1.com is a family business launched in 2003. Mate1 is a privately held company and they currently have had over 25 million members registered since launch. About 1 to 2 million members are active at any one time on the dating site. Currently Mate1 is available only in English but there are plans on translating Mate1 into other languages next year sometime.

At the moment Mate1.com offers a 3 Day trial for under $2 and then a monthly subscription for $49.99 USD. They plan to add a 3 months, 6 months and 12 months membership subscription plans soon. Mate1.com has always been free for women to reply and contact any paid member, but this will change soon.

The big news is Mate1.com plans to switch to the freemium business model . This means all the basic services are free on the dating site like creating a profile, searching, replying to any mail message and contacting paid members. The only real thing you will not be allowed to do as far as we know is initiate contact with other free members. You will have to purchase a membership for this (at this point we are unsure if chatting will be available to free members). This freemium model is virtually identical to what Mate1.com was offering women on their dating site except now it is for men and women.

Wasserman did say on the show that in about a week, the new membership model will go into effect. The radio show was posted on August 29th, 2009, just over 5 weeks ago. When I logged into Mate1.com today, I was still presented with the old membership upgrade page and no way to access my mail messages. Obviously things have been delayed, I wonder why?

We did also learn that Mate1 does block certain ranges of IP addresses from different countries that a lot of spam and scammers come from. They also use technology from Iovation to fight fraud. Iovation technology works by taking a digital finger print of a computer. If this computer has been flagged as a potential scammer then the computer is blocked from the dating website.

Mate1.com is also planning to integrate social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter into their dating site. First up is a new Facebook application called "Connect More" which allows you to see which of your friends, friends are members of Mate1 and if they are actively looking for a partner.

For more information, listen to Cyber-Dating Expert Radio and to find out more about this dating site, read our review of Mate1.com.

Aaron contacted us here at DatingSitesReviews.com asking us to post some job positions he needs filled for a new internet dating site he is planning.

Here is his request:

WEB-BASED START-UP SEEKING CTO, DESIGNER, CODER, + ENGINEER

We are starting a new kind of online dating service. In order to create the site, we are hiring design and tech professionals in the following areas:

Online dating can be tough to begin with, but what if your religion (or lack thereof) isn't very popular? Everyone deserves to find their special someone, no matter if you are atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Pagan, Wiccan, or even a Jedi.

Set Up Custom Searches

You may find that the standard searches set up by your dating site of choice do not give you exactly the kind of people you'd like to meet. You'll want to make a custom search that includes your normal search criteria (age, distance from you, etc.) as well as their religious beliefs.

If It's Hard To Find Matches...

If you're looking for someone who shares your beliefs (or non-belief!), sometimes you get very, very few search results. Your first step is to expand your search radius a bit - add another 20-50 miles and see if you can snag a few more matches in your search net. You could also loosen up on some of your other criteria. Maybe tweak the age limit a bit or the body type. Play with your other criteria and see if more people show up for the party.

To power their complex matching algorithms, eHarmony relies on four database and data warehousing products.

• The very popular and open source MySQL database server.
• Oracle Database.
• Data warehousing appliances from Netezza Inc.
• Hadoop, a open source data crunching application which divides work among a large number of computers.

eHarmony uses Orcale to do the initial matching after a new member signs up. For the behind the scenes processing, eHarmony uses a 50 node Hadoop cluster. Since moving to Hadoop, eHarmony has seen 4 to 6 times sped improvement in how long it takes to perform matching calculations on a large scale.

All this technology is controlled by eHarmony's main technical team, which includes 40 engineers based at the Los Angeles headquarters. eHarmony also has hired a number of development firms throughout Europe, which has doubled the number of engineers working for them.

To find out more about the technology that powers eHarmony, read ComputerWorld. For more on the dating site itself, check out some of our reviews of eHarmony.