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Some of you may have notice in the last month or so that eHarmony has added a new feature to their dating service called "Something to Talk About". This feature is designed to help break the ice and to get conversations started between matches much easier.

To setup "Something to Talk About" you first need to visit the "My Profile" tab found when you log into eHarmony. Once on the tab, take a look at the "In My Own Words" section. Here you will find the link "Something to Talk About". Currently there are eleven topics that you can answer one or more questions on. Sample topics include sports, Music, Movies and Leisure. Questions under these topics can be as easy to answer by checking off what sports you like, to actually typing in a short answer.

So when does "Something to Talk About" get used? When you are viewing your profile matches and when a match has also filled out "Something to Talk About" you are presented with a nice block on the right side of the page that shows all the things you and your match have in common.

To find out more about this dating site read our eHarmony review.

The internet traffic audience measuring service, comScore, issued a press release which covered the top growing websites and site categories for February 2010. Since February is usually considered the top month for dating sites (thanks to Valentine's Day) I thought we should take a look.

Traffic to online dating sites in February grew 5 percent to 24.2 million visitors when compared to January. The top 4 dating sites in America for February were:

1. eHarmony with 5 million visitors (up 82 percent) - Read Review
2. Match.com with 3.4 million visitors. - Read Review
3. PlentyofFish.com with 2.8 million visitors. - Read Review
4. SinglesNet.com with 2.6 million visitors. - Read Review

For comparison, other Valentine's Day categories like Flowers/Gifts/Greetings websites saw traffic increase by 7 percent to 32.3 visitors. In this category AmericanGreetings took the number 1 spot at 10.6 million visitors. The e-Cards category grew by 7 percent as well to 23.1 million visitors with MyFunCards.com leading the category with 6.3 million visitors. MyFunCards was up 75 percent when compared to January.

eHarmony will be having a 4 day free communication weekend (FCW) starting this Thursday March 18th, 2010 through to Sunday March 21st, 2010. This promotion will be available on both the United States and Canadian eHarmony dating sites.

These free weekends are a great time to join eHarmony to try out the service. As a member during a free communication weekend you will get to review all your matches and communicate with them at no cost. This enables you to try out most features of the site for free, including the guided communication process and emailing, and all without a credit card. These weekends are notoriously busy for eHarmony so they are great way to quickly meet some new singles in your area who are interested in a long term relationship.

This will be the 24th eHarmony free communication weekend with the last event occurring on Valentine's Day (see Story). During this promotion FastTrack and viewing members photos are not available to free members.

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular matchmaking service.

We noticed that eHarmony has shut down eHarmony Marriage. eHarmony Marriage was launched on February 6, 2006 as a service to help couples fix a struggling marriage. As of November 2009, eHarmony had removed all links to eHarmony Marriage on their dating site and as of last week, the domain "marriage.eHarmony.com" now gets redirected to eHarmony Advice.

eHarmony Marriage was an interesting concept that I guess didn't take off. At one point back in December of 2008 we notice that eHarmony Marriage only had about 1,000 visitors a month (see Story). This number is not large, especially when you consider eHarmony the dating site receives millions of visitors a month.

The main way I found eHarmony promoted the marriage service was through the dating site itself. If a user picked "separated" or "married" as their current relationship status when filling out a profile, they would then be asked by the website if they would like to learn more about eHarmony Marriage (see Story). With the closure, I guess if a marriage has reach the point of someone searching dating sites for singles, it is beyond the point of them wanting to fix the marriage.

eHarmony is not out of the marriage business all together. In 2008 they bought the popular websites Weddingbee (see Story) and Project Wedding (see Story).

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

We closed the 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll last month (Feb. 18) with a total of 705 votes from the public. This is over 100 more votes than last year's Single's Choice Awards. It is good to see people participating in the poll since ultimately it is online daters like yourselves who decide which service becomes the popular one to use. Plus, singles who visit our site and are new to online dating use our awards as a tool to indicate which dating sites to try out first.

As with last year we listed the top 10 dating sites for our visitors to vote on. The top 3 voted dating sites got an award, Gold, Silver and Bronze. The one thing we did different this year was we added a second question to our poll asking which free dating site would be your top choice for an award. To find out the answer to this question, check out this story.

The recipient of the Gold 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Match.com. This is the third year in a row that this dating site has won the Gold Single's Choice Award which shows Match.com continues to be the market leader in online dating. Match.com has a proven record of success and many members worldwide who know if you want to be serious about finding a partner, Match.com is the leading dating site to join. This year Match.com received 2 percent more votes than in 2008 for a total of 201 (29% of the total vote).

The recipient of the Silver 2009 Singles's Choice Award is eHarmony. This is eHarmony's second year to win this award. They earned 22 percent of the votes (same as last year) which was 153 total votes out of 705. The dating site with the famous matching system certainly had a number of changes this year. There was new features added, profile tweaks and a successful Facebook fan page.

The recipient of the Bronze 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Yahoo! Personals. Yahoo also won this award last year as well except they slipped 2 percent this year and ended up with 11 percent of the total vote, which means they had 74 votes. While Yahoo may have taken 3rd place they still run a first rate dating service. All you have to do is log into their dating site to find out why.

This year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll are (click the dating site name to read our full review):

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Yahoo! Personals
4. Chemistry
5. Lavalife
6. SinglesNet.com
7. PerfectMatch.com
8. FriendFinder.com
9. True.com
10. Date.com

We would like to give a big THANKS to everyone who participated this year in the Single's Choice Award.

I found a news item on the eHarmony blog that was interesting. Researchers at UC Berkeley teamed up with a dating site to find out how important the photo headshot is for a dating profile. For both genders, researchers found that a photo in a profile was necessary for a member to be deemed attractive. Researchers also found that participants of the study said that the actual content of the profile was then used to determine if the member in the profile was a possible match and deserved to be contacted. The photo is the hook, but it is the content in the profile and how the person portrayed themselves that is the deciding factor for communication.

Finally, once the two online daters met face to face, looks became the least important predictor of a long term relationship. The overall attraction and the "connection" were deemed most important.

Find out more on the eHarmony Blog. For further info about this matchmaking service, read our eHarmony review.