General News

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.

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.

According to a poll from the People Media Network of dating sites, they found on average 52 percent of singles find no advantage to being single and rather have a partner. This leaves 48 percent of singles finding some advantage to having a "still looking" relationship status. In comparison, 33 percent of people polled said that being able to do what you want to do is the main advantage of being single, while 7 percent said living alone. 4 percent of singles said they like being single because they can date, and the same percentage said they like it because they can choose how to spend their money.

This poll ran on 13 of People Media's dating sites in the month of August and the first part of September. 27,000 members took part in the poll.

To find out more about People Media's most popular dating sites, read our review of BlackPeopleMeet.com and our review of SeniorPeopleMett.com.

Here is some major news, a new dating site (in beta) has launched! 😉

We get news sent to us almost every day about someone wanting to plug their new service. The information sent to us about this new dating site is a bit unique, so I thought it was worth mentioning. The dating site is called Gelato. It is basically a friend feed for dating. After a user signs up to Gelato, he or she then can connect one or more of their accounts from Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM (music feeds), and Netflix. When searching for new matches, information from these different sites are displayed on a member's profile.

Each member at Gelato also has a Scoop Rating which is based on a large number of criteria and the information from your social networking accounts. This rating system is designed to show how authentic a member is according to Gelato. For example, each social networking account that you verify with Gelato, they will give you 25 points in the rating system. If you have at least 25 friends in Facebook, you get an additional 25 points. If your relationship status in Gelato matches the one on your Facebook account you get some more points (35). In the end the Scoop Rating system is designed to show other members how honest you are.

The site design is a little basic at the moment (too much white space) and I feel it needs some more search options but it is a good start for a beta dating site. It will be interesting to see how much this site will be welcomed by online daters in the coming months.

If this new dating site interests you, go visit Gelato.

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:

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.