This weekend all Chemistry users will be able to communicate for free. This promotion starts first thing, Friday January 7, and runs Saturday, and all day Sunday January 9. Free communication means that any member of Chemistry can send and receive email from any other Chemistry member. This is at no cost and with no credit card required.

This is a busy time of year for online dating which means it is an excellent time to try out Chemistry to see if it is the right dating site for you. Chemistry's in-depth profile and matchmaking system make it ideal for singles looking for a long-term relationship and marriage.

The last free communication weekend was held in November (see Story). This upcoming one will be Chemistry.com's 12th they have run. For more information on this online dating site that matches you with members based on personality, you can read our review of Chemistry.

Well, we have completed point number 2 from our Dating Sites Reviews - New Features and Updates! story. The Dating Site Top Ten lists have been redone. They now are completely dynamic ranking each dating site and/or service at the point when the visitor views the page. All dating services are also included in the rankings with the exception of ones that have gone out of business or have as yet been categorized.

While we were at it, our full Online Dating Site Reviews list was upgraded as well. Instead of the entire catalogue of categories and dating services being displayed, we now offer a convenient dropdown control on the page that allows visitors to view each dating site category separately on one page.

Stay tune for more updates. We plan to finish our new advance Dating Site Search Engine by the Christmas Holidays.

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.