General News

The Online Dating Insider got the word out that Lavalife Prime has started to charge it's members. Geared towards singles 45 and older Lavalife Prime relies more on its social network than other dating services. It is more about participating in the forums and sharing your life experiences with photos and videos you can upload.

One interesting thing I noted was the title of Lavalife Primes home page. It reads "Adult dating site for women and men 45+". This title doesn't exactly lead me to believe it is a dating site for your typical older singles. If you do a search for "lavalifeprime" on Google, this is the title of the site and the search result and it doesn't exactly bring senior dating to mind! The term "Adult Dating" usually refers to the more sex driven side of the dating industry. Lavalife Prime is obviously trying to generate visitors from this popular search term even though it doesn't exactly relate to what they are offering. If you look at the home page of Prime it looks like a very conservative dating site. IMO, Lavalife Prime should put the name of the site back into the title and remove the word Adult. Do it at least for the misleading search engine results!

Well, the last few weeks have been pretty slow around here as I was away on vacation for over 2 weeks. I could only do so much with my laptop and dial-up internet access. I had forgotten how sssslllooowww dial-up really was. Expect to see a bunch of dating related news stories this week as I compile my bookmarks and notes from the last few weeks.

I guess, I better get writing!

Dave at Online Dating Insider has a comment about this at Iovation (a company that deals with preventing fraud) which talks about how easy it is to bypass most background checks. I agree with Dave that background check and fraud detection companies should work together. I also see the need for the concept of something like OpenID to be expanded further to allow for additional information (that could be verified) to be available to sites that ask for it (if the user approves it of course). This way, you could log into multiple dating services with the same account and you would only need your personal ID information verified once.

For those of you who don't know what OpenID is, it allows you to use the same username and password across different websites. This helps reduce the number of usernames and passwords you have to remember plus, it helps people expand their internet presence (ie you know Joe from the one website is the same one from another, if it uses the same OpenID account). A number of popular websites support this including MySpace, Yahoo and many WordPress sites. More information on OpenID can be found at this website.

We were sent by eHarmony a coupon code for their six month subscription that gives new members 20% off or an additional $30 US. This promotion is for both the United States and Canadian sites and expires on September 30th, 2008. The Code is:

CJSUMMERPROMOAABB

They made the code is a little long which makes it a little hard to remember. Visit eHarmony now or for more information on this dating service (including user opinions), read our review.

A press release yesterday from Chemistry.com informs us that Denver residents will be receiving a Free Communication Weekend, starting today (August 1st) to August 3rd. Full access will be available to Denver singles including the ability to communicate with other locals. Chemistry.com currently has over 5 million members.

With the success of eHarmony's free weekends I guess Chemistry decided to give it a try. Not sure why it is only for Denver though. Maybe in the next week or so they will have another free weekend for a different city. This way Chemistry may generate more press.

The last time Chemistry offered free memberships was mid June for the state of California (see Story).

Check out our Chemistry Review for more information on this dating service.

Australia's largest dating site, RSVP, announced this week that they have launched a dating community for singles in rural and remote parts of their country. Of their 1.3 million members, 25 percent of them state they live in regional areas of Australia. This is up more than 60 percent from 2 years ago. RSVP saw the need of this new community to allow these singles an easier time of meeting other like minded people, where time and distance make a crucial difference.