Online Dating

From now through March 13th, 2009, Perfectmatch members can enter for a luxury vacation to Jamaica! If you win the Grand Prize, you and one guest receive a 4 day / 3 night stay at any Sandals resort in Jamaica with roundtrip airfare included through the airline Air Jamaica. The total value of this prize is $3850 US. This promotion is called Get Restless in Jamaica Sweepstakes and is part of a Perfectmatch's tie-in with the daytime soap opera, The Young and the Restless.

Visit Jamaica sweepstakes to enter. Read our Perfectmatch review for more information on this popular online dating site.

Chicago Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart on March 5th, 2009 sued Craigslist, the popular internet classifieds website. He is accusing them of being a one of the largest sources of prostitution in the United States.

The federal lawsuit filed by Dart's office claims that Craigslist's erotic section is a powerful marketing tool for pimps and prostitutes and makes it easier for criminals to elude police.]

A Craigslist spokeswoman said that compared to all of the legal classifieds on the site, these type of criminal acts are rare. She also said that Craigslist constantly helps law enforcement to track down people who post illegal classified ads.

Sex workers use online classifieds because they find that sites like Craigslist helps to reduce physical violence by customers. This often means as an added benefit, that pimps are not needed. What Craigslist does is offer a buffer between the prostitute and the client through the anonymous email system. Plus, most hookers find that people who use the internet to find sex, tend to have a much lesser chance of being violent.

Police also have used Craigslist to pursue criminal investigations. One example was given from Seattle, where police arrested 71 men in response to one sex ad on Craigslist.

For more on this story, check out Cnet News.

Once again PlentyOfFish is planning to offer a paid service. Their previous attempt with Virtual Gifts wasn't too successful. In my opinion it was due in part to the high cost of the gifts, which ranged from $9 to $30. This time around POF will offer an upgrade to the existing free membership which will last 3, 6 or 12 months. Markus, the CEO of PlentyOfFish is calling the new feature the Serious Member Profile Upgrade. It is designed for members to signal to the community that you are serious about meeting your match.

So what do you get when you sign up for the feature? Advertising will be removed from your profile and a Serious Member Star will appear on your profile beside your main profile photo. A star icon will also appear on any image thumbnail of you. Your search result as well, will be highlighted in gold to make it stand out in the standard search results and the gallery search results. We currently do not know the cost of the new features so we will just have to wait for a few days until the new feature goes live on the site.

I think this is a good move for PlentyOfFish as long as they keep the price down, at least in the beginning so the existing members can get use to it. I don't really see members signing up based on showing that they are a serious dater. They will sign up because their profile will be highlighted and stand out more from the crowd.

Will this new feature steal members away from paid dating sites? I don't really think so, most singles who move on from a dating site (Free or Paid) do so because they have run out of other members to contact. Becoming a serious member will not give you any more people to contact.

There have been a few articles lately regarding who owns all the user profile information and communications that people do on social networks and online dating sites. It really came to the forefront in the news when Facebook updated their Terms of Use a few weeks ago that readdressed the ownership issue. Basically Facebook wanted almost complete control of all user generated content.

irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sub-license) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), ...

Many Facebook users complained about these new terms and with all the media attention it was getting, Facebook has rewritten their Terms Of Use and has posted a draft copy. They are even allowing users to comment and vote on the new proposed Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities For Users. This is a surprising move that should make many Facebook users happy.

In the online dating world, dating sites have Terms of Service that can vary wildly. Some are similar to Facebook's old terms and some to the new terms of use. The one thing with dating sites you may wonder about is how long do they keep all this information for and what they do with it. With most of the popular dating sites they have strict privacy policies about who may see what information. As far as with how long the information is kept, it is all over the map. Dating sites like eHarmony doesn't delete your information from their database. With eHarmony's 200 plus questionnaire, this is a good thing as if you ever need to return to the site, your information will still be available to you when you reactivate your account. The flip side of this for example, is Plenty Of Fish. If your account is inactive for 6 months to a year then your account will be deleted. Not a big deal if you are a returning user as it only takes less than 5 minutes to fill out any required information for the profile.

For more information on the Facebook new terms of use, read PC World. To better understand the life of your online dating profile on many of the popular dating sites, read ComputerWorld.

I was reading The Paradigm Shift and notice some comments about members not being able to access PlentyOfFish.com. I just tried it myself and it looks to be true. Plenty Of Fish appears to have gone down at least an hour ago, around 4pm eastern standard time. The internet browser returns a HTTP 400 error, which seems to suggest that the actual web server is experiencing problems. The last time that we know of when Plenty of Fish went down was mid July 2008, when there was a fire which knocked out power to the building where their servers are housed.

Update #1: As of 8:00pm EST all seems back to normal. PlentyOfFish.com is now back online.

Update #2: March 1, 2009 - I notice this morning that PlentyOfFish.com is still online but is really slow. You also may get server out of memory errors when you attempt to login or perform searches.

Update #3: March 1, 2009 - As of noon, things seem to be back to normal again.

Update #4: August 9, 2010 - For those of you reading this post about POF being offline today, for more information and updates read: Plenty of Fish is Down - August 9, 2010

For more information on this dating site, read our Plenty Of Fish review.

Thanks to the Online Dating Insider for the news.

Christian Cafe just had its 10th Birthday. The founder of this dating site, Sam Moorcroft, certainly has seen a lot of changes in the industry since 1999. Back then the site was optimized for viewing in 800x600 resolution and using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (IE is up to 7 now). Quicktime 4 was mentioned along with the site recommending "Works Best for 56k Modems And Above". There even is a spot for AOL and WebTV users to click (Ahhh, how I miss all those AOL CDs I use to get in the mail!).

Find out more about Christian Cafe by reading our review.