General News

Over a week ago we updated our user submissions for dating site ratings and reviews and we have already received a number of dating reviews using the new system. The highlight of this upgrade is, visitors now can rate a number of different important aspects of the dating site. These dating site aspects can include:

• Feature Set - Did the dating site have all the features needed?
• Ease of Use - Was is easy to find and use everything on the dating site?
• Popularity - Is the dating site popular and contain a number of profiles?
• Profile Quality - Are member profiles filled out completely? Are there to many fake profiles?
• Customer Service - Did customer service and the online help system meet your needs?
• Cost - Was the cost of the dating service membership worth the price?
• Searching - Did it work well and allow you to search for the criteria you wanted?
• Matching System - Did the automated matching system give you acceptable matches?

Not all aspects are available for rating, for all dating sites. As example eHarmony doesn't offer the ability for its members to search for their own matches. Therefore, visitors do not have the option to rate eHarmony on Searching. Here is an actual example of how the a new overall dating site rating looks:

Our older dating site ratings are still available for reading and still effect the overall user average rating of a dating site. Our new system is still being developed so if you noticed anything acting out of the ordinary (i.e. Bugs) or want to make a suggestion for improvement, please Contact Us.

To submit a review for any of the dating sites in our list please visit our Reviews Summary Page.

Related Items: Updated User Dating Site Rating System Coming Soon

We found this PDF file on eHarmony called eHarmony | Harris Interactive 2007 Marriage Metrics Number of eHarmony Marriages, which explains the facts behind their findings in which 236 eHarmony users get married every day. Of all the popular dating sites on the web today eHarmony is definitely one of the more trusted dating sites. By releasing the facts behind their claims, it helps improve eHarmony's creditability even more.

To find out more about eHarmony, please read our review.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise released a book recently called "Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters". For those of you who don't know Hitwise monitors the internet and compiles anonymous statistics for clients on how often web sites are visited, how they are found and the demographics of the person doing the surfing. There are many companies that do this type of work with Compete.com and QuantCast.com being some of the other popular ones. These 3 statistic sites of course usually don't see eye to eye and the data they release every month never fully matches. What it does though when you compare the statistics is give you a general idea on how websites you are interested in are performing.

One of the topics the book covers is online dating. Of the top 10 dating sites it lists most of the Male to Female ratios hover around the 50 percentile mark with the most notable exceptions being the gay dating sites. eHarmony also has a much more uneven Male to Female ratio of 38% to 62%. What I was surprised at is the average age range of eHarmony visitors. Bill pegged it at 25 to 34 years of age. I had thought eHarmony members tended to be older than this. Match.com members average age according to Bill is between 35 and 44 which I would see as being more reasonable for eHarmony. eHarmony also appeared 7th on the list behind such dating services as Adam4Adam and DateHookUp. While these are popular dating sites, in my view and research eHarmony receives many more visitors. With this ranking issue found with his online dating facts, it puts into question the rest of the statistics.

Now QuantCast monitors eHarmony directly through a business agreement, you can trust their statistics for this site much more. Bill's book and Quantcast do pretty much agree on the gender ratios and age ranges for eHarmony. For the month of August 37% of the visitors where male (which makes 63% female) and 40% of the visitors where between the ages of 18 to 34. 38% of visitors fell in the age range of 35 to 49 and 20% were over 50.

QuantCast also had another stat which was interesting. 16% of visitors used eHarmony through a business internet connection. With the way companies monitor their internet connections these days, I wouldn't be doing this.

eHarmony announced today that they have partnered with AOL Personals (which is in BETA). They will be offering their matchmaking services to American Online visitors along with dating and relationship advice through the “eHarmony Boutique”. The interesting thing here is AOL already has a partnership with Match.com. On the AOL Personals homepage both dating services share the same space. AOL tells visitors to use the Search for a Match option (which is powered by Match.com) to give you complete control over your searches and to use the Get Matched option (which is powered by eHarmony) to receive matches to compatible singles. I would be surprised if Match.com was happy about this new eHarmony partnership. They already have a sister site called Chemistry.com which competes with eHarmony directly.

How do you tell someone on a dating service you are not interested? Winks are easy, you don't reply. It starts to become difficult when you have corresponded with the person for a while and it is even worse if you have gone out on an actual date.

Our poll that asked this question of our readers got some interesting results. Out of 255 votes, 38% of the voters (98 votes) would tell the person the truth about why they do not want to pursue the relationship. Almost 16% or 40 votes would tell a white lie instead. That means not quite half of the voters (46%) just stopped talking to the person with no warning what so ever. You have to wonder why online dating sometimes has a bad name. In the real world we wouldn't just walk away from someone whom we grew board talking with. We would politely excuse ourself.

Young people (and some older ones as well) need to remember that whatever you post on the internet will then be available forever. It doesn't matter if it is a text message, a picture or a video, it most likely will be replicated on other websites. Sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are extremely popular and some postings on these sites have ended up haunting people. More and more, employers, police and institutions are using these sites to see how people they are interested in, are behaving. A few court cases have even used pictures from these social networking sites as evidence in criminal court. You of course also have to watch out for your camera happy friends who like to post pictures on the internet. You may not have posted it but sites like Facebook still let you link pictures of people with their member accounts.

Just remember posting a picture of yourself doing something funny may seem like a great idea now but, will it still be funny in 5 or 10 years when you are trying to get hired for an important job?

For more insight on your privacy and internet posting, plus examples of legal cases where pictures from the internet are used, check out Canada.com.