General News

I saw some interesting statistics on a website that mentions:

According to the US Census, 40% of American adults patronize the services of online dating sites resulting in about 120,000 marriages annually.

I searched the U.S. Census Bureau website for awhile and couldn't find the information mentioned in the quote. If this statistic is true, it would mean that eHarmony is responsible for a third of all marriages that resulted from online dating. According to eHarmony they are responsible for on average 118 marriages a day or 43,000 in one year, in the United States (see stats).

I am suspect of the number of total marriages resulting from online dating as mentioned in the quote above since, other facts didn't ring true in the article. As example, it also mentions:

China too expects dating patrons to grow in huge numbers. With 64 million singles residing in the nation, the market is expected to double in the present year.

The United States has a population of roughly 300 million with over 90 million singles. Canada has a population of 30 million with a third being single. This is the same ratio as the United States. China has a population of over 1.3 billion. I would expect them to have more that 64 million singles, a lot more! If the same ratio holds true then you would expect to see over 400 million singles.

For the full article called Internet Dating – The Good, Bad and Ugly, visit MedIndia.com. See our eHarmony Review for more information on this dating service.

According to the unofficial eHarmony blog, eHarmony is planning its eleventh free communication weekend this coming Labour Day. It starts Friday, August 29, 2008 and ends on Monday. September 1, 2008 at midnight. On these 4 days new members of eHarmony will be able to communicate for free and really test drive the dating service. This promotion will be available for both the US and Canadian eHarmony sites.

Visit our eHarmony review for more information and user opinions about this dating service.

Late last year I started putting together a list of things I wanted to change about the user submitted dating reviews. Currently our user reviews of dating sites allows for:

• A descriptive title for the review.
• The major positive point(s) of the dating site.
• Any negative points or features found.
• The bottom line, Do you recommend the service?
• A 1 to 5 star rating of your user experience.
• A descriptive review which allows the author to go into the details of their experience with the dating service.

I felt like user dating reviews was lacking in one department, the star rating. When users submit ratings I found they tended to focus in on one aspect of the dating site and not the overall experience. The result was either really low ratings or really high ratings for the dating services. Over the last couple months we have been updating our rating system to include sub ratings that will make up the over all rating of the users review. This way if the user thought that the dating site had really bad customer service then they can give it a one star, but if the rest of their user experience wasn't too bad then they could rate the rest of the criteria accordingly.

Currently we are considering the following sub ratings for our user reviews:

• Feature Set
• Popularity
• Member Profile Quality
• Customer Service
• Cost
• Profile Search Abilities
• Automated Matching System

Please comment on this story and give your opinion on what sub ratings you would like or not like to see. This is just a preliminary list and it will most likely change.

We are hoping to have these new features rolled out by the end of September.

An article called You and improved takes a look at a few of the photo retouching services that are available on the internet. Since the rise of social networking sites this type of business has become a lot more popular. Now it is not only dating site members using the service but people from Facebook, Flicker and MySpace as well.

A few services like Look Better Online offer the full package which includes a photographer, a studio (with proper lighting, etc..), and photo touch ups if needed. Most of the photo touch up services just take your pre-existing pictures which you have uploaded to their website. Retouching can include simple things like fixing the lighting of the photo, removing red eye and whitening your teeth. More advance retouching services allow for the removal of acne, moles and reducing your wrinkles. Some services even go a step further and offer to slim the person in the photo as well. This can include everything from your arms and legs to your waist. I also notice on one site I found, you can go the other way in which men can get a more muscular physic and woman can have larger breasts.

In a world where almost every commercial photo printed now has been retouched, does these type of services have a place in online dating? Like profile writing services, for the most part I think they do. Some people just don't take good pictures (I am one of them!) and going to a professional can help. The photographer can find your best angle and enhance your features with the proper lighting and background. For those of you who already have a decent picture with just a few problems you don't know how to fix then these retouching services are a great option. Small touch ups like red eye, acne removal, lighting and color usually start around the $5 mark. With regards to online dating I think this is where most people should stop. Getting your photo "Slimmed" may help you get more responses but in the end you are not being truthful in which on your first date your partner will discover. The way you look shouldn't matter, but for a lot of people it does.

I just closed our poll called: Do you perform a background check by searching the internet for someone before you date them?

Lets take a look at the results,

After 284 votes with almost an even response from both men (54%) and woman (46%) there is a marked difference between the genders responses on if they perform a simple background check of their dates by searching the internet. Almost three quarters of the woman who voted performed a simple online search. To compare this, only 45% of men do a similar search.

These findings is pretty close to what I expected. Men obviously feel more secure on dates since they usually are bigger and stronger than the person they are going out with. They also probably feel more confident that they can weed out any potential scammers by just seeing how the person communicates and acts through the online dating service.

The problem is, this type of check isn't going to produce much relevant information most of the time. You can hope it may end up confirming a few things, if you say, find the person's Facebook page or some other piece of information from a website that matches up with what they told you or wrote in their profile. The main problem with searching the internet through Google or Yahoo is most people's names brings up a large number of search results. My name is not too common but, I had over 32 pages of search results on Google. That can be a little confusing. There are people with the same name as me who have been a Football Player, Book Authors and a Robot Scientist.

Our review of LavalifePRIME is now up. This online dating service is designed for singles who are 45 years and older and contains a number of social networking features. If you enjoy active conversations on message boards and chat groups, and are looking for a relationship or online friends, this site has a lot to offer.

Check out the full LavalifePrime Review now.

Are you a member of LavalifePRIME? If so, why don't you post your own review.

LavalifePRIME User Review