Help for finding online dating services and dating apps.
On June 5th, 2009, IAC completed the deal previously announced in early May with Meetic (see Story). IAC sold Match.com European operations for 27 percent equity stake in Meetic along with a 5 million Euro promissory note.
On Tuesday, Match.com was sued in New York federal court by Sean McGinn for $5 million. This New York man alleges Match.com deceives its members by posting profiles of dates who cannot respond to communication requests, since they have not paid for a subscription. McGinn attorney, Noah Hart says people leave the dating site feeling completely "ignored and rejected" since no one replies to their emails. Hart is hoping to turn this suit into a class action.
Online dating sites have been sued a number of times lately. eHarmony has been sued at least twice, over gay rights issues (see Story) and in March True.com was forced to pay a $1.5 million settlement in regards to their auto billing and renewal practices of memberships (see Story).
Starting this weekend, Saturday June 13th at 12:01 am EDT Facebook users will be able to choose a username for your profile. What this allows is your identity to be easily seen in your Facebook URL which up to now is just a number, as example:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890
The new look will be similar to how Twitter does it:
http://www.facebook.com/your.username.here
There are several reasons for Facebook adding this new feature, with the main one being to allow for easy identification of a profiles URL. This will also make it easier for search engines like Google to identify and index web pages.
This is a first-come, first-serve basis so if you have a name in mind, I would reserve it early Saturday. Full detail instructions are available here and will also be present on your homepage starting this Saturday. Privacy isn't a concern since your new username will have the same privacy settings as your profile name.
For more information, read the Facebook blog post.
According to The National, there are as many as 40 million singles from the United States who are looking for love on social networking sites and online dating services. With the recent bad press online personals has received lately due in large part of several murderers meeting their victims through Craigslist, The National decided to take a further look at the dangerous side of online dating.
The article brought up several cases, including the 2 Craigslist ones mentioned above.
In April a Boston medical student, Philip Markoff, dubbed the “Craigslist killer” by the media, was arrested and charged with murdering a masseuse who advertised on the popular website’s erotic services section.
Two months later Craigslist was hit with another scandal when it emerged that a North Carolina man used the site to hire a man to rape his wife while the husband watched.
A received a number of visitors emails late yesterday informing me that PlentyOfFish.com was down. POF was offline for at least 8 hours on June 9, 2009 (thanks Glennis) and currently 3 hour this morning (June 10, 2009).
From what I could tell at 12:30am EST was the POF web server is up but not serving web pages. So it doesn't seem to be a network problem. I am just making an educated guessing here but, It could be a software glitch, a hardware issue (bad hard drive?) or maybe the dating site got hacked? When I get any new information I will post it here.
The last major downtime for Plenty Of Fish was back in late February (see Story).
Update #1: As of 8:30am EST, Plenty of Fish is online and working without any problems. The exact time it went back online is unknown.
Update #2: POF was down due to a power outage and a upgrade to the core database server (see Story).
For more information on this dating site, read our Plenty Of Fish review.
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