General News

According to Netcraft the social networking giant Facebook had a brief period of outages on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008. The BBC were informed it only affected certain countries. Netcraft found the site unavailable from all of its collectors which are located in Pennsylvania, San Jose, Phoenix, New York, Virginia, Italy and the United Kingdom (London).

No new outages have been reported since Wednesday and the site had now been updated to fix the problem according to Facebook.

In online dating, are more matches better? Well, according to PhysOrg.com this may not be the case. A study done recently showed that:

people tend to anticipate that they’ll feel better about “shopping for a mate” when there is a large number of options. However, in actuality, people feel equally good when faced with few as opposed to many options.

Participants in the study predicted on average that they would be most satisfied with between 20 and 50 matches. What was found, was these same participants in actuality experience similar satisfaction with just 4 matches.

Eyealike is in the spot light again with news that it is in negotiations with some major online dating and social networking services to incorporate its facial recognition technology into their sites. None are mention so we can only speculate who they are talking about. The article does point out that this technology is best suited for the casual dating and speed dating sites since these types of service are more about physical attraction.

Dating services who are interested in this technology can expect a well documented and load tested product.

Eyealike's technology is also designed to integrate with a Web site's existing keyword and attribute-based search systems. Eyealike Faces is compatible with Windows and Linux servers and the company said it's optimized to work on Windows PCs and Macs as well as most smart phones

Pricing for companies to incorporate this product into their websites includes an annual license fee and additional charges may occur depending on other criteria like frequency of use.

For more information read "Online Dating's New Face" at Internetnews.com.

Related Story: Dating Search via Facial Recognition

Update - The rumor was only partly true. The free weekend is for Canadians only at eHarmony.ca.

I am not sure if it is true but I heard a rumor that eHarmony is having another Free Communication Weekend for the United States and Canada from Saturday June 28 to Tuesday, July 1. This weekend falls on Canada Day (July 1st) and is close to the US Independence Day holiday. The last free weekend at eHarmony was from May 23 to May 26 which was close to Canada's Victoria Day holiday (May 19) and also Memorial Day in the US. Maybe there is something to this rumor after all?

If you where thinking of trying out eHarmony for the first time I would wait to this Saturday so you can communicate with your matches for free. These promotions from eHarmony are usually only for new members who actually sign up on the specified weekend.

For more information on eHarmony, read our review.

The unofficial eHarmony Blog has a post about how she received a free month on eHarmony when she reported several fake profiles after communicating with members who were obviously not who they said they were. Poor english skills and huge inconsistencies where the warning flags.

No matter how hard a dating service tries, scammers are always going to get by the automated and manual checks of the dating site. Part of most dating services defences against scammers is to rely on their members to report them. In most cases people report fake profiles and move on, you never know what becomes of your report. Did the dating site follow up or did your email go straight to the trash bin? It's nice to see a service that acknowledged the problem and rewarded the members work with an additional month.

This is just good business for eHarmony. You don't want an unhappy member to go out and tell their friends.

For more information about this service, read our eHarmony Review.

Recently MillionaireMatch.com has added some new verification services. They already verify if a member qualifies as a Millionaire (if the proper documentation is sent in) and your primary photo, they will now also verify your age and occupation. When a dating site is geared towards matching Millionaires with other singles and assets play an important role, these verification services help both types of members out greatly. The millionaire members gets more activity on the site since his profile information is marked as verified and non millionaires don't have to worry about if the verified members have exaggerated some of their profile information.

I also notice, MillionaireMatch.com now allows guest members (free members) to reply to any gold members emails or instant messaging request. This greatly opens up the site to gold members since they know anyone can reply to their messages and they don't have to just send messages to other gold members.

For more information, please read our MillionaireMatch Review.

Related Story: MillionaireMatch.com New Features