eHarmony

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.

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 closed the 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll last month (Feb. 18) with a total of 705 votes from the public. This is over 100 more votes than last year's Single's Choice Awards. It is good to see people participating in the poll since ultimately it is online daters like yourselves who decide which service becomes the popular one to use. Plus, singles who visit our site and are new to online dating use our awards as a tool to indicate which dating sites to try out first.

As with last year we listed the top 10 dating sites for our visitors to vote on. The top 3 voted dating sites got an award, Gold, Silver and Bronze. The one thing we did different this year was we added a second question to our poll asking which free dating site would be your top choice for an award. To find out the answer to this question, check out this story.

The recipient of the Gold 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Match.com. This is the third year in a row that this dating site has won the Gold Single's Choice Award which shows Match.com continues to be the market leader in online dating. Match.com has a proven record of success and many members worldwide who know if you want to be serious about finding a partner, Match.com is the leading dating site to join. This year Match.com received 2 percent more votes than in 2008 for a total of 201 (29% of the total vote).

The recipient of the Silver 2009 Singles's Choice Award is eHarmony. This is eHarmony's second year to win this award. They earned 22 percent of the votes (same as last year) which was 153 total votes out of 705. The dating site with the famous matching system certainly had a number of changes this year. There was new features added, profile tweaks and a successful Facebook fan page.

The recipient of the Bronze 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Yahoo! Personals. Yahoo also won this award last year as well except they slipped 2 percent this year and ended up with 11 percent of the total vote, which means they had 74 votes. While Yahoo may have taken 3rd place they still run a first rate dating service. All you have to do is log into their dating site to find out why.

This year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll are (click the dating site name to read our full review):

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Yahoo! Personals
4. Chemistry
5. Lavalife
6. SinglesNet.com
7. PerfectMatch.com
8. FriendFinder.com
9. True.com
10. Date.com

We would like to give a big THANKS to everyone who participated this year in the Single's Choice Award.

I found a news item on the eHarmony blog that was interesting. Researchers at UC Berkeley teamed up with a dating site to find out how important the photo headshot is for a dating profile. For both genders, researchers found that a photo in a profile was necessary for a member to be deemed attractive. Researchers also found that participants of the study said that the actual content of the profile was then used to determine if the member in the profile was a possible match and deserved to be contacted. The photo is the hook, but it is the content in the profile and how the person portrayed themselves that is the deciding factor for communication.

Finally, once the two online daters met face to face, looks became the least important predictor of a long term relationship. The overall attraction and the "connection" were deemed most important.

Find out more on the eHarmony Blog. For further info about this matchmaking service, read our eHarmony review.

The Catalyst Group released a 48 page document (see below) which outlines the experiences of 16 online daters of which 8 used Match.com and 8 used eHarmony. As stated in the report, the intention of the document "is to highlight broad themes and provide insights as to how these sites are used".

Note: Unfortunately the source to the video and/or image which once was displayed here has since been removed by the authors for an unknown reason.

I found the report itself to be more of a comparison of how Match.com and eHarmony work. The bulk of the report tackles how each dating site handles the online dating process. They broke it up into 3 phases, which are Identifying Matches, Reviewing Profiles, and Communication. The authors did include some information about what the users did and did not like for each site but there was no real comparison as to which site approach which phase better, and why (or how they could improve).

eHarmony nor Match.com participated in any way with the study. After reading it through thoroughly, I found it is an excellent source of information for those of you who wish to know how Match.com and eHarmony work and how their approaches to online dating differ. As mentioned in the limitations, the study sample is very small and may not represent the views of the overall population. But, what were the researchers' conclusions? Near the beginning of the Match.com and eHarmony Usability Study of Online Dating they list some general perceptions. The researches were told by the participants of the study that online dating sites come up short on their claims about matching. Most users had little confidence in the technology and the process behind the matchmaking. Despite all this, people use dating sites because they do offer a pool of potential matches for them to access when the more traditional ways of finding a date (bars, family, friends, etc...) do not work.

In the end the researchers concluded that eHarmony was preferred by singles who needed/wanted to be led every step of the way in the online dating process. This was especially helpful for those singles that lack self confidence in communicating with their matches. On the other hand, Match.com was seen as a "good compromise between the restrictions of eHarmony and the wild west of free sites".

For more on the story, read the WSJ Blogs. To find out more about these 2 dating sites you could also read our eHarmony review and Match.com review.

For the Editor's Top Pick - Match System Award, the recipient this year is eHarmony. This is the second year in a row for eHarmony to win this award, and the reason why is, this dating service continues to push the boundaries in matching singles. eHarmony also achieved a major membership milestone in 2009. By September they had surpassed 30 million member accounts since the launch of their dating site in 2000.

eHarmony has always been about matching people through compatibility. This is the reason for the in-depth profile and the 200 plus questions. eHarmony needs to get to know you before they can match you with someone. Most dating sites rush you through the sign up process in under 5 minutes; eHarmony's takes a good hour. This means most members you find on eHarmony are serious about finding love since they need to make a fair commitment in time before they can view their matches. Another thing that makes eHarmony different is they send you matches of compatible singles. You do not search for them. This may put some people off, but what this allows eHarmony do is make sure you see the right people who are compatible with you. Not the people you think should be compatible, by the searches you perform.

If you are someone who is interested in a long term relationship and are someone who believes matching involves compatible personalities then eHarmony is the dating site for you. If you need proof that eHarmony works, all you need to do is visit their Facebook Fan Page to see the thousands of submitted success stories and pictures on their wall.

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

This Year's Runner Up for this award is: Chemistry.