Online Dating

Here is another story that has been in the hopper for a while.

Back in November 2008, Match.com updated the interface of their dating site and for the Profile Editor (see Story). The editor has an easier flow than the previous one with more Web 2.0 features. This means less reloading of the page in the web browser as some of the content is streamed when needed. An example of this is the auto filling of certain profile questions, that are based on your previous answers. My only small complaint so far is the list of sections to the left . When you click on the About Me section (as seen in the image on the right), the sub sections like Appearance and Interests appear. These clickable sub sections of the profile are in smaller lettering. To identify these as sub sections they need to be shifted or indented to the right like a tree structure. With the way it looks now, something doesn't look right.

Last month Match.com updated their profile process with new questions, and answers to existing questions. If you are a returning member and have an existing but old profile, look for the new icons that identify New Questions and Updated Questions while editing your profile. They icons appear when you hover your mouse cursor over the questions. New questions can be found in the sub sections under the About Me Profile section. The Get to Know Me sub section is almost completely new with the Lifestyle and Interests sub sections receiving a few new questions as well. Some of the new question also contain pictures. While having pictures as part of the profile questions is not ground breaking by any means, it does help breath a bit of life into the profile creation process.

The other thing which I notice when I was online at Match.com is they are advertising the fact that adding a picture to your profile will attract 15 times more attention than a similar profile without a photo. Most dating sites say your chances of contact is 10 times greater. I wonder what the real answer is?

For more information on this dating site, read our review of Match.com.

Consumer reviews on the internet for products and services usually receive more negative posts than positive, since most people satisfied with a product or service tend to be using it rather than writing reviews. It is probably the same for reviews of employers. I found a website called Glass Door which allows visitors to review their current and past employers. The website currently has over 26 thousand companies listed, with most of them being publicly traded. The site is new and is in beta so most companies do not have a lot of reviews yet.

A reviewer can list their job title, the Pros and Cons of the employer and Advice to Senior Management. They also rate the company on 8 different attributes (which is then averaged to a 5 bar rating) and also select if they approve or disapprove of the company CEO.

There are not a lot of employer reviews for dating site companies but, here are a few I found reviews for:

Congratulations to ChristianMingle, they recently announced that they had passed the 2 million member mark. This religious dating service was launched in 2001 and has grown into one of the largest niche Christian dating services on the internet with thousands of singles joining every day. Of course when you join, you wouldn't have access to 2 million singles actively looking for a date. This number reflects the total number of members who have joined since the dating site launched. What this number does illustrate is, ChristianMingle continues to grow and prosper. This makes it a good dating site for a person to join if they are looking for someone of a Christian Faith and/or who believes in Christian values.

A quick check on internet traffic analyzer website, Compete, shows that of all the niche Christian dating sites we have reviewed, ChristianMingle receives the most unique visitors, by far every month. Here is graph of their monthly traffic over the past year:

This year in May, ChristianMingle received over 650 thousand unique visitors. This is almost twice as many visitors as in May, 2008.

For more general information on this dating site, read our review of ChrisitianMingle.

Not as much warning this time around, but we knew it was coming. It is official, eHarmony in Canada and the US are having a free communication weekend starting today, Thursday July 2nd, until Sunday, July 5th, 2009.

For those of you who haven't heard of eHarmony's free weekends, it means most features of the dating site are free to use for new and existing members. This includes not only getting to review your matches, you can communicate with them as well. The one thing not included is, Fast Tracking the communication process.

This is Free Communication Weekend number 18 for eHarmony. The last one was held on the Memorial Day weekend in May.

Read our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular online matchmaking service.

In April we looked at another federal lawsuit which claims eHarmony's matching system is not scientifically proven (see Story). The lawyers for the lawsuit (Lange & Koncius LLP) have now setup a website for people to get more information. You can find the website called eHarmony Class Action Litigation (eHarmonyClassAction.com). Thanks to the unofficial eHarmony Blog for this information.

In my opinion, from all of the information I have read about dating sites, eHarmony probably has put the most effort into their matching system. They have a number of doctors on staff at eHarmony Labs who are experts in their fields of study and whose purpose is to research and improve the matching system. eHarmony spends over $3 million a year at this. While, they haven't released much scientific proof or had many independent studies done (as far as I know), if any dating site can back up their matching system with scientific research, it is eHarmony.

For more on eHarmony Labs, read eHarmony's Love Lab

People Media announced a partnership with AOL Personals back in March to offer niche dating services to AOL's visitors (see AOL Personals and People Media Partner). Last Thursday at a dating industry conference called iDate 2009, they announced that they have launched 6 new niche dating sites for AOL and have also updated their existing sites with new matching and community features. The new upgrades include a smoother flowing registration process, more advance searching options and, new profile attributes and features.

Currently People Media has 27 niche dating sites which in total experience almost 4 million unique visitors per month. In April of this year, the People Media brand of dating sites had seen a 55 percent increase in traffic when compared to the same time last year. People Media's best known niche online dating sites are Black People Meet and Love and Seek.

For more information about this news, read the press release at PRWeb.