eHarmony

We just got word that eHarmony in Australia (eHarmony.com.au) is having a free communication weekend starting today, Friday October 2nd, and ending Monday October 5th, 2009.

Not only can all members (including free ones) review matches for free but you can communicate with them as well. Just remember if you are a new non paying member, don't use the guided communication FastTrack option. This option is not available for free during this promotion and you would lose the ability to communicate with this member. For those of you who have not used eHarmony before, the FastTrack option allows you to skip the 4 step guided communication process and permits you to go ahead and send a email message right away to your match.

The last eHarmony Australia Free Communication Weekend was held at the end of August (see Story).

Read our review of eHarmony and find out why Australian singles have made this a very popular matchmaking service.

To power their complex matching algorithms, eHarmony relies on four database and data warehousing products.

• The very popular and open source MySQL database server.
• Oracle Database.
• Data warehousing appliances from Netezza Inc.
• Hadoop, a open source data crunching application which divides work among a large number of computers.

eHarmony uses Orcale to do the initial matching after a new member signs up. For the behind the scenes processing, eHarmony uses a 50 node Hadoop cluster. Since moving to Hadoop, eHarmony has seen 4 to 6 times sped improvement in how long it takes to perform matching calculations on a large scale.

All this technology is controlled by eHarmony's main technical team, which includes 40 engineers based at the Los Angeles headquarters. eHarmony also has hired a number of development firms throughout Europe, which has doubled the number of engineers working for them.

To find out more about the technology that powers eHarmony, read ComputerWorld. For more on the dating site itself, check out some of our reviews of eHarmony.

eHarmony in the United Kingdom launched in July 2008. It is just over a year later and they now have 400,000 members. For the first couple of months eHarmony was giving out free 90 day subscriptions to all new members (see Story), but beyond that they did not do a lot of marketing. According to Greg Waldorf, eHarmony's chief executive,

... last year's launch was deliberately "soft" so the company was not left in the awkward position of having lots of members of one sex signed-up without a sufficient number of the opposite sex to provide enough suitable matches.

For comparison, a competitor of eHarmony's in the United Kingdom, Match.com, has had 6.5 million singles signup as members since launch (a number of years ago).

It looks like eHarmony has topped the 30 million member mark (unofficially). According to the Unofficial eHarmony Blog and their super sneaky technique of finding the total membership count, this milestone happened on September 10, 2009. To find out for yourself where eHarmony is at, you just have to check the JavaScript source code of the membership page.

To find out more about this dating service, check out our eHarmony reviews.

It has been confirmed for eHarmony here in the US and Canada that they will be having a Free Communication Weekend, starting this Friday (September 4, 2009) until Monday (September 7, 2009). In Canada this will be their Labour Day Holiday long weekend.

As the name suggests, eHarmony Free Communication Weekends mean all members can review and communicate with all matches for no cost. These promotional weekends have become extremely popular for eHarmony, so expect a flurry of matches if you decide to signup. If you have been thinking about trying this internet dating service for a while now, this weekend, is the time to try! Remember, no credit card is required.

By our count this is Free Communication Weekend number 19 for eHarmony. The last one was held in July on the Independence / Canada Day weekend in July (see Story).

Read our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular online matchmaking service.

According to eHarmony's official blog, The Newlywed Game is looking for couples of all ages who may be interested in being on the show, which appears on The Game Show Network. Taping of this season of the show would happen in September and October of 2009.

This new iteration of The Newlywed Game is sponsored by eHarmony and is hosted by Carnie Wilson. The show allows couples to compete against each other by being asked questions on how well they know their spouse. This is the second season of the show with the first being aired back in April, 2009 (see Story).

For more information and for you and your spouse to be considered as contestants please email: thenewlywedgame@embassyrow.com to apply. The Game Show Network would like you to include the following information in your email:

• Names and ages (you and your spouse).
• Your City/State and phone number wwith area code.
• Email Address.
• Your Wedding Date, and a photo.
• If you met on eHarmony.

All participants of the show must be 18 years of age or older and married 2 years or less by October 9th, 2009.

For more information on the dating site, read our eHarmony review.