General News

The Online Dating Insider pointed out that Hannah Schwartz of the Australian dating site RSVP said that their membership is up 31 percent this quarter when compared to the same quarter last year. Schwartz states in the following video (around the 6 minute 27 second mark) that the membership increase is driven mainly by woman and the total membership number for RSVP is now over 1.4 million.



She further states that when surveyed, members have turned to online dating due to the recession, and the need to cut back expenses.

For more on this popular Australian dating site, read our RSVP review.

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.

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.

Note: Unfortunately the source to the video and/or image which once was displayed here has since been removed by the authors for an unknown reason.

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.