eHarmony

This year eHarmony won the Customer Service Department of the Year at The 7th Annual American Business Awards. This award was presented June 22, 2009 at a ceremony in New York City with over 600 executives in attendance. Here is the list of honorees for the Customer Service Department of the Year:

STEVIE AWARD WINNER:

• eHarmony, Pasadena, CA

FINALISTS:

• Dice Holdings, Inc., New York, NY
• iCIMS.com, inc. Hazlet, NJ
• IHG Guest Services, Atlanta, GA
• LifeLock, Tempe, AZ
• The Venetian & The Palazzo Resort - Casino - Hotel, Las Vegas, NV

This year more than 2,600 entries were submitted for the American Business Awards in which over 200 executives nationwide judged to help decide the Finalists and Stevie Award winners. Other award categories included Best Overall Company of the Year, Best New Company of the Year and, Consumer Products Website of the Year.

To find out more on what these awards are all about and for a complete list of the 2009 American Business Award honorees in all categories, visit the ABA website. For more information on this popular award winning matchmaking service, read our eHarmony.com review.

The Unofficial eHarmony Blog has dissected a few web pages over at eHarmony and they have figured out, to date that the dating site has had over 28.1 million user registrations (for all countries). By looking at the source of the registration process and in particular the JavaScript, you can find your user ID number. This number is incremented each time a user is registered. So, if you ever want to know exactly how many users have registered, follow these instructions to find your eHarmony User ID.

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

We have had a run of press releases over the last week or so dealing with dating services. I found one for eHarmony in which they have chosen to use the fraud-fighting technology called the Interceptas platform, from Accertify. eHarmony reviewed several fraud detection systems and found the platform from Accertify would enhance their fraud-fighting capabilities the best. Interceptas is a tool for e-commerce websites and it:

provides comprehensive fraud-fighting tools and components in a single, integrated system that allows merchants to integrate more data into the fraud-fighting process for improved screening success. The platform can be used to manage a variety of data management challenges across the enterprise. In addition, its automated workflow features strengthen fraud defenses and reduce the manual effort involved in fraud protection.

Incereptas is just one of the many systems eHarmony uses for a multi-pronged fraud protection strategy.

For more information on the dating site mention in this article, check out our eHarmony Review.

eHarmony released the results of a single parent survey which they had conducted by Opinion Research Corp. 252 single parents in the US where interviewed for this survey in April and May, of 2009. The margin of error is 6 percent.

According to the eHarmony survey:

• 51% of single parents believe they are better off emotionally when they are in a committed relationship and 47% of single parents believe their children are better off emotionally when they (themselves) are in a committed relationship.
• Of these 51% single parents, only 40% are in an actually relationship.

So what these stats are basically saying, is about 50 percent of single parents really should not be dating, if you take your child's emotional well being into account. The problem with these type of surveys is, the information can be skewed one way or the other, depending on how you look at it. For one thing these singles are self-identified as single parents, this fact is open to interpretation. The other thing is, it doesn't say is how many kids these parents have or their ages. Looking at a single parent with one child who is 10 years old is completely different than if you look at a single parent family, with 3 kids under the age of 6.

I found the following information regarding some of the challenges single parents face when dating again, interesting:

• Finding the time to date (74 percent)
• Getting back into the dating world (69 percent)
• Finding the money to date (42 percent)
• Finding a babysitter so they can go on dates (37 percent)
• Telling a new love interest that they have a child (22 percent)

Finding the time and the money to date is not surprising since, if you have children, you know both are in short supply. Telling a new love interest you have young ones is a challenge that is best done right away, before any type of relationship has a chance to develop. You are not doing yourself any favors by holding this information back. This is one of the reasons why online dating sites are popular with single parents. You can state in your profile up front that you have children, which never makes it a "challenge" for you to tell someone.

For the complete release and all of the statistics, read Business Wire and for more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review. You can also find dating sites that cater exclusively to single parents in our Single Parents Dating category.

One of eHarmony's senior research scientist is psychologist Gian Gonzaga. He holds a doctorate in personality / social psychology from UC Berkeley. KansasCity.com has a short interview with him where he describes briefly what the core qualities partners need to share to have a successful relationship.

The big ones — some of the most powerful ones — are personality traits. Things like how agreeable of a person you are, how open you are to experience. Are you extroverted? So are you looking for a lot of interactions in the social world? Or are you introverted?

Dr. Gonzaga also talks about why it matters that couples share these types of traits.

Because if you are similar to someone, it’s a lot easier to understand what it is they’re thinking. ... They like to believe that what they think is true, and one of the ways that we do that is to look to other people who have the same interests and beliefs and values. So when we see that in a partner, we feel validated in our sense of self, which makes us feel better and makes us like that person.

He further explains that opposites may attract but, these type of relationships really don't last. If you are really different from your partner, negotiating the way you see things from how your partner does over and over again, as each new conflict situation arises, is extremely difficult to do. Over the long run these type of relationships just fizzle out.

Dr. Gonzaga mentions Compatible Partners as well. This is eHarmony's new dating site for gay and lesbian relationships. He was asked a question about if gay relationships share the same characteristics as a heterosexual relationship:

We think so. The existing literature on same-sex couples indicates that a lot of the same theoretical basis of sharing the same deep values is going to predict better relationships over the long haul. So right now we’re moving on the assumption that the same kinds of models are going to apply well, and then over time we’ll work on that model to tailor it as best as possible.

This is the first time that I know of were eHarmony has said they are going to spend some research money to see if gay relationships actually do differ from heterosexual relationships.

For more information on this popular personality matchmaking site, read our eHarmony review.

The Unofficial eHarmony Blog let us know with a post that eHarmony has updated their interface based on feedback from users. There are now 3 tabs which organize your eHarmony matches. The New tab shows all new matches. The Communicating tab shows all matches you currently communicating with or have requested communication and the Closed tab shows all matches you have closed or have been closed by the match. A search field also has been added to find your matches easily, with a built in auto complete. Communication also has been streamed lined to make things faster and simpler to use.

For more information on this popular matchmaking service, read our eHarmony review.