General News

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.

Another spoof video which mentions eHarmony has been making the rounds called Meet Rhonda Delay. The video was created by Cisco and it is part of a series of viral videos in which Cisco is using in its latest successful marketing campaign. Rhonda first complains about eHarmony rejecting her 3 times until (and a little goof in the video here at the 10 second mark) where she says that, she then passed the third time (should be fourth) when she was on Percoset. She then goes on and complains about the slow internet because Don (the man she met on eHarmony) took forever to answer her email.

They also hit a few other points in the video about Don, being cheap, etc. which tied in nicely with the message at the end about Cisco. Cisco isn't mentioned by Rhonda, but there is some text with a link to a website about using Cisco products to improve your connected life. This is a very effective marketing campaign and I think it is just the start for these types of videos produced by companies for the internet. I think if one of the popular dating sites did something similar which poked fun of themselves in a light-hearted, but funny manner, it would be a huge success and bring them lots of business.

For more information on the dating service mentioned in this YouTube video, check out our eHarmony review.

Two of OkCupid's co-founders, Chris Coyne and Christian Rudder (who met in a Harvard math dept.) created OkCupid's complex matching system, which they have coined the UberAlgorithm. The UberAlgorithm is all mathematics and essentially tracks the tests and quizs members take at OkCupid. The test answers are tracked and then analyzed so they can be compared with other members to create a compatible percentages. Members can then view these matches when they log on to OkCupid. One of the unique things at OkCupid is, these tests are created not only by staff but by users as well and cover all sorts of topics, whether serious or goofy. Members of OkCupid to date have answered more than 500 million 3 part questions, which equals over 1.5 billion pieces of data. From this data, personality trends are calculated based on 60 axes in which OkCupid tracks (religion is one such axis). Each member information is compiled and compared to each axis, which is also compared with others of your gender, age and sexual gender preference.

As other dating sites like Chemistry and Perfectmatch promote the fact that they have famous psychologists working for them to help create matching systems, OkCupid has stated that they don't need psychologists because their own members create their match algorithms. The UberAlgorithm takes care of figuring out each person's personality and the user tells OkCupid what type of person they want to date.

OkCupid has created a very interesting matching system that does work for a number of people. The problem is taking tests is not every persons cup of tea. This is why OkCupid tends to attract singles in their low to mid twenties. OKCupid hopes that as these singles age and mature, they will continue to use their site, increasing their over 30 age demographic. By being a free dating site, OkCupid doesn't have the funds for a research team of psychologists to help design a matching system. While users who know specifically what they want shouldn't have a problem with their matches on OkCupid, it's the members who are not sure that may suffer poor matches. Based on the members own personality, a match system needs to know that what the member is asking for in a partner is something that is compatible with his or her personality and requirements, not because that is who they think would make a good match. It is the job of the automated match system to know what makes a relationship last.

For the full interview, read Gelf Magazine. For more details on this dating site, read our OkCupid.com review.

eHarmony released the results of a single parent survey which they had conducted by Opinion Research Corp. 252 single parents in the US where interviewed for this survey in April and May, of 2009. The margin of error is 6 percent.

According to the eHarmony survey:

• 51% of single parents believe they are better off emotionally when they are in a committed relationship and 47% of single parents believe their children are better off emotionally when they (themselves) are in a committed relationship.
• Of these 51% single parents, only 40% are in an actually relationship.

So what these stats are basically saying, is about 50 percent of single parents really should not be dating, if you take your child's emotional well being into account. The problem with these type of surveys is, the information can be skewed one way or the other, depending on how you look at it. For one thing these singles are self-identified as single parents, this fact is open to interpretation. The other thing is, it doesn't say is how many kids these parents have or their ages. Looking at a single parent with one child who is 10 years old is completely different than if you look at a single parent family, with 3 kids under the age of 6.

I found the following information regarding some of the challenges single parents face when dating again, interesting:

• Finding the time to date (74 percent)
• Getting back into the dating world (69 percent)
• Finding the money to date (42 percent)
• Finding a babysitter so they can go on dates (37 percent)
• Telling a new love interest that they have a child (22 percent)

Finding the time and the money to date is not surprising since, if you have children, you know both are in short supply. Telling a new love interest you have young ones is a challenge that is best done right away, before any type of relationship has a chance to develop. You are not doing yourself any favors by holding this information back. This is one of the reasons why online dating sites are popular with single parents. You can state in your profile up front that you have children, which never makes it a "challenge" for you to tell someone.

For the complete release and all of the statistics, read Business Wire and for more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review. You can also find dating sites that cater exclusively to single parents in our Single Parents Dating category.