Online Dating

Not much online dating news as of late since we are in the midst of the most popular weeks people go on holidays. I did find a well written article from Times Online that looks at one authors humorous view of online dating in the United Kingdom. I especially liked the question he asks:

Is getting drunk and pouncing on the person least able to resist really less superficial than meeting someone online?

I would say it depends on the dating site! At least with online dating sites you can take peoples interests and goals into consideration and not just their looks.

In the end the author says that internet dating is a "no-brainer" for single people serious about finding a match. After looking for someone special at work and the bars, where else do you have to look?

Well it looks like eHarmony United Kingdom has been launched. Originally rumoured to open in June, 2008 the dating site is now accessible (props to the unofficial eHarmony Blog for finding out this). No official press releases as of yet have been found and no links exist on the other eHarmony sites pointing to the new UK dating site.

For a limited time when new eHarmony members living in the United Kingdom sign up, they will receive a free 90 day membership. I would assume, all current eHarmony members living in the UK who signed up at the main eHarmony.com dating service will have the option to be moved to the UK dating site to take advantage of its UK specific matching system. eHarmony United Kingdom will need to get a lot of members fast so they can start competing with other popular UK Dating Services and, giving away free memberships is one way to do it. They will just need the marketing campaign to back it up.

eHarmony UK has partnered with the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) to help predict what makes a couple compatible in the United Kingdom. The Oxford Internet Institute is a department of the University of Oxford and was founded in 2001. A research team from OII gathered relationship data from 1000 married couples living in the United Kingdom that ranged in age from 19 to 81 and with relationships that spanned from under 1 to 65 years. With this data eHarmony was able to come up with a scientific matching system based on their key dimensions of compatibility. This matching system shares many similarities with its US counterpart but differences were found by the UK research team which are now taken into account.

Visit the eHarmony United Kingdom home page or check out our eHarmony UK Review.

Related Story: eHarmony to open a dating service in China

According to Netcraft the social networking giant Facebook had a brief period of outages on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008. The BBC were informed it only affected certain countries. Netcraft found the site unavailable from all of its collectors which are located in Pennsylvania, San Jose, Phoenix, New York, Virginia, Italy and the United Kingdom (London).

No new outages have been reported since Wednesday and the site had now been updated to fix the problem according to Facebook.

In online dating, are more matches better? Well, according to PhysOrg.com this may not be the case. A study done recently showed that:

people tend to anticipate that they’ll feel better about “shopping for a mate” when there is a large number of options. However, in actuality, people feel equally good when faced with few as opposed to many options.

Participants in the study predicted on average that they would be most satisfied with between 20 and 50 matches. What was found, was these same participants in actuality experience similar satisfaction with just 4 matches.

Eyealike is in the spot light again with news that it is in negotiations with some major online dating and social networking services to incorporate its facial recognition technology into their sites. None are mention so we can only speculate who they are talking about. The article does point out that this technology is best suited for the casual dating and speed dating sites since these types of service are more about physical attraction.

Dating services who are interested in this technology can expect a well documented and load tested product.

Eyealike's technology is also designed to integrate with a Web site's existing keyword and attribute-based search systems. Eyealike Faces is compatible with Windows and Linux servers and the company said it's optimized to work on Windows PCs and Macs as well as most smart phones

Pricing for companies to incorporate this product into their websites includes an annual license fee and additional charges may occur depending on other criteria like frequency of use.

For more information read "Online Dating's New Face" at Internetnews.com.

Related Story: Dating Search via Facial Recognition

Update - The rumor was only partly true. The free weekend is for Canadians only at eHarmony.ca.

I am not sure if it is true but I heard a rumor that eHarmony is having another Free Communication Weekend for the United States and Canada from Saturday June 28 to Tuesday, July 1. This weekend falls on Canada Day (July 1st) and is close to the US Independence Day holiday. The last free weekend at eHarmony was from May 23 to May 26 which was close to Canada's Victoria Day holiday (May 19) and also Memorial Day in the US. Maybe there is something to this rumor after all?

If you where thinking of trying out eHarmony for the first time I would wait to this Saturday so you can communicate with your matches for free. These promotions from eHarmony are usually only for new members who actually sign up on the specified weekend.

For more information on eHarmony, read our review.