We are a little late starting this year, but the Single's Choice Award poll for 2010 is now online and open for voting. This is the first step in our annual Dating Sites Reviews Choice Awards were we recognize the best online dating sites of the year (we have been handing out awards since 2007). For 2010, the Awards now includes 12 Editor's Top Picks Awards and of course our popular Single's Choice Award where visitors get to decide which dating service deserves the spotlight.

This year there are 17 dating sites to choose from for the Single's Choice Award. Voters will be able to cast 2 votes. One for the best paid dating site and a second one for the best free dating site. Here is the poll for the Singles Choice Award, please cast your votes:

Facebook was down yesterday morning for about 2.5 hours. From around 9:30 AM eastern standard time to about 12:00 PM most people reported not being able to access Facebook. Most received a DNS failure message similar to this one:

Service Unavailable – DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

This was Facebook's longest outage in about 4 years and was the result of the database being overwhelmed by requests. This was due to a new software update that handled certain error conditions. The software update incorrectly found an invalid configuration value when someone connected to their Facebook account. This error would result in numerous queries to the database. When you times the number of database queries by the number of people who use Facebook everyday worldwide, this error quickly brought Facebook's database servers to their knees. The problem also compounded itself because, if the same person tried to visit Facebook again, the whole process would start over again.

To fix the problem, Facebook's engineering team had to shut down the site. Once the database servers stopped receiving requests the reason for the problem was discovered and then fixed. Once completed, Facebook then slowly allowed people back on the site and monitored the situation closely. The system that checks for errors in configuration values is turned off at the moment. Engineers are going over new designs for the system to make sure this problem doesn't happen again.

For more details on the problem Facebook experienced, read Robert Johnson Blog.

Some exciting updates and new features are coming to Dating Sites Reviews over the next couple of months. Some of the updates affect things more behind the scene, while others will be noticeable right away to returning visitors. To start things off, today we just completed the first set of updates.

The first thing you will notice is that we have fixed the web site width to that of a 1024 pixel wide screen. The reason for this is after examining our traffic logs we determined that almost 20 percent of visitors still uses this screen size. This meant going any bigger was out of the question. Before today, our site would flow from widths between 1024 and 1440 pixels. Why set a standard width for a web site? The main reason for us is, it allows us to format pages and articles easier since we can just assume the page will be a set size.

The biggest change to Dating Sites Reviews though is that we now track a lot more information about each online dating site and service. This means we can bring up this information anywhere on the site including not only in the actual reviews, but in our dating category lists (this has been a requested feature many times). When viewing our dating categories now, you will see a lot more information for each dating site:

eHarmony in both the United States and Canada will be offering free communication this Labor Day weekend (or as the Canadians like to spell it, Labour Day). This 4 day free event begins at 12:01 AM on Friday, Sept. 3rd, 2010 and ends at 11:59 PM on Monday, Sept. 6th, 2010.

Free communication weekends (FCW) at eHarmony allow all free members to not only take the relationship questionnaire and receive matches for free, but they have the chance to communicate with their highly targeted matches as well. This is all at no cost to you and with no credit card required. I have already seen a number of TV commercials advertising this FCW so you can expect eHarmony to be extra busy this long holiday weekend. Viewing of members profile pictures and Fasttracking the guided communication process is not included in the FCW events.

By our count this will be eHarmony's 28th free event. The last eHarmony free communication weekend occurred in July (see Story).

Update #1: It looks like singles in Australia are not being left out. eHarmony Australia is having free communication this weekend as well.

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on the popular online match making service.

Opps, we missed this Chemistry free weekend by a day. Still, it is not too late to give them a try since the free communication weekend ends Sunday, August 22, 2010 at midnight. What does a free communication weekend give you at Chemistry.com you may ask? Well, a new member will be able to create a profile, take the personality test, receive matches and communicate with those matches, all at no cost and with no credit card required. You receive most features that a paid member at Chemistry would.

The last Chemistry free communication weekend was during the same weekend in July (see Story). This type of promotion is the ninth time Chemistry has run one. To find out more information on this popular dating service which delivers highly targeted matches based on your personality, read our Chemistry.com review.

eHarmony commissioned a new marriage metrics study from Harris Interactive in 2009. They have released the statistics from the study this week in part to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. The last Harris Interactive study done for eHarmony was in 2007 (see Story); it concluded that 236 eHarmony users get married every day. This was based on data from April 1, 2006 to March 31, 2007. So, it has been about 3 years since this statistics has been updated. Let's see what Harris Interactive found out.

What they found was that the number of marriages per day resulting from eHarmony has doubled. On average, 542 people are married every day in the United States because of meeting online at eHarmony. Wow, this means there will be another 271 happy couples who married today, thanks to using the dating site eHarmony. This new data came from an online study from Harris Interactive which they ran during July and August of 2009. 7,994 people responded to this study, aged from 20 to 54 and who were married between Jan 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009. If you calculate it out, during this 18 month period, 148,311 eHarmony couples got married. This equals to 4.77 percent of all new marriages in the United States.

For more on this story you can read the 2009 summary of the eHarmony Marriage Metrics Study. For more about this dating site and how it matches members together, read our popular eHarmony review.