General News

The Richard Ivey School of Business (The University of Western Ontario), Intouch Magazine (Winter 2009 edition), has a feature story about the history of a few of their graduates who are successful business men in the online dating industry. Lavalife co-founder Nicholas Paine (HBA ’83) is interviewed first. He talks about his experience in the early 1990's of converting their Tele-classifieds business (Classifieds over the phone) into a web personals site, and by 2001 into the popular dating site Lavalife.

Sam Moorcroft (MBA ’95), is also interviewed about how he started the popular Christian dating site, ChristianCafe.com. In the late 90's Sam had used a U.S. based Christian dating service to meet women locally and on the advice from a friend decided to start a website himself.

The key to the success of Christian Cafe.com was filling a niche in the market. Moorcroft knew from the women he had dated that they wanted to meet believers like themselves.

In the beginning years Sam and his brother held down several jobs to support themselves while they got their online dating site off the ground. In ten years ChristianCafe.com has grown into a multi-million dollar business.

To find out more information about these dating services from Canada, read our ChristianCafe.com review and our Lavalife review.

eHarmony legal troubles may be over in New Jersey but in California they are just starting. According to a press release another class action lawsuit has been filed and certified by California Superior Court Judge, Victoria Chaney.

The plaintiffs in that case maintain that eHarmony’s decision to establish a separate site for gays rather than integrate its flagship site, eHarmony.com, amounts to an unlawful “separate but equal” policy and the continued marginalization of gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

eHarmony's separate site for gay singles is called Compatible Partners, which just launched recently.

An article on QUEERTY called If eHarmony Must Allow Gay Dating, Should Gay Sites Have To Welcome Straights? examines the California lawsuit more closely with some good comments by their readers. The author seems to be on eHarmony's side as he points out if eHarmony must allow gay singles to join their dating site, then sites like ManHunt and Adam4Adman should allow straight singles to join. Some of these gay dating sites do allow heterosexuals to join but most do not cater directly to this type of sexual orientation.

On March 31, 2009 Perfectmatch announced the release of their Love and Money Assessment. It is used to quickly assess your financial habits and values, and help you to determine the ideal economic "profile" of your Perfect Match. With the first major economic recession since online dating has became popular, singles on dating sites now have been wanting to know more about how their matches deal with money. This includes things like spending money on luxuries vs. necessities; how much money is appropriate to save, etc. These types of questions certainly are not romantic but in the current financial climate, it is what a number of singles think about.

“Duane Dahl, CEO of Perfectmatch.com, said that more users of the site today are asking questions to his relationship experts about their mate's finances. Those questions are coming up now at the same point as ones about desire to have kids and talking about past relationships ... What the recession has done is reinforced the importance of finance and money and the effect on a relationship

The Australian media company, News Digital Media, has partnered with Match.com. This partnership will result in the integration of the Match.com.au dating site into news.com.au, Australia's leading news portal. Match.com's main dating site competitor in Australia is Fairfax owned RSVP. This new deal will give Match a big competitive boost against RSVP, whis is currently the largest Australian dating site.

For the full news post, read MediaBizNet. For more information on Match, read our Match.com review.

Chemistry.com just sent us some news. They plan on having a 72 Hour Flirt-a-thon this weekend. This means all members will be able to flirt, communicate and connect for free from Friday April 3, 2009 until Sunday April 5, 2009. Sending and receiving emails is included.

This is Chemistry.com second Flirtathon, with the first one happening over 2 months ago during the last week of January. It was a huge success for Chemistry and its members so, if you are thinking about trying Chemistry, this weekend would be a good time to create a free trial membership and check it out.

Read our Chemistry.com review for more information on this popular dating site.

Well, eHarmony finally launched its dating website for same-sex matches yesterday, called Compatible Partners (a day before they were required too). This was part of a settlement agreement with the New Jersey Attorney General that involved a discrimination case against the company.

The actual Compatible Partners works pretty much the same as eHarmony and, that might be a problem. Compatible Partners uses the same Patented Compatibility Matching System. As stated on the homepage:

The Company's patented Compatibility Matching System was developed on the basis of research involving married heterosexual couples. The Company has not conducted similar research on same-sex relationships.

While I have not finished our review yet, I can tell you the Compatible Partners questionnaire is pretty much the same as the one on eHarmony. One would tend to think that what makes a heterosexual relationship a success would differ somewhat from a gay relationship. eHarmony does run eHarmony labs which is where the research is done for their matching system. It has a $3 million a year budget. I wonder if they currently have set aside any of these funds for researching what makes a successful gay relationship?

At least what Compatible Partners does bring to the table is a gay and lesbian dating site for establishing long term relationships that is not driven by sex, as a lot of other popular same-sex dating sites seem to be.

If you are looking for a same-sex relationship, visit eHarmony's new dating site CompatiblePartners.net. For a limited time they are offering a free 6 month membership (for the first 10,000 registered members).

Stay tuned for our review of Compatible Partners coming soon.

Update: Our new review of Compatible Partners is now online.