General News

Love at first byte by the Daily Record looks at the question about if Online Dating is still a tabooed subject and if couples are embarrassed to tell others how they met online. The author contacted 10 local couples to tell their story and only one gave their permission. Apparently based on just this statistic the author assumed that people do not want to share their online dating experiences. The article does mention the point of "Some people certainly don't want their personal lives splashed on the newspaper's pages.". This is certainly true but, I think the author should of increased the number of people he asked to share their online dating experience with. He should of also asked couples who didn't meet online if they would be willing to share how they met each other. I bet when he compared the two results, the ratio would be not as bad as he thinks it is.

Early last year we did a poll called Do you tell your friends you're Dating Online?. Of the 330 votes, just over 43% said they would tell their friends. So this means almost half of the people said they would share their online dating experiences. This is a much better result than 1 out of 10 that the Daily Record assumed. Of the 86 voters who said no in our poll, the reason for this was they did not want their friends to see their dating profile and the personal information it contained. This makes sense to me but, it is a little weird that it is ok for strangers to see some of your personal details but not your friends. I think this can especially hold true for men. You want your image to remain tough and macho to your male friends, so you can't show them you have a soft side in which your dating profile might portray.

The Chicago Tribune has a story about some of the research going on to find out how attraction works between people, both gay and straight. The author takes a look at 4 aspects of this. These aspects are DNA matching with the online dating site ScientificMatch.com (see our other story on them), how physical attraction and evolution works, if there is a love hormone and finally, how your brain effects love.

More and more dating sites are pushing how they have the science and research behind their match system. eHarmony, Chemistry and Perfectmatch are the big 3 who promote their matching system and the science along with their relationship experts. All of these sites post a summary review of how their matching systems work as quoted by the experts. None as of yet (that I am aware of) have actually gone in great details on how their system works and made the research public to back it up. We also need peer reviews of these matching systems from an independent source to begin to fully trust these matching systems. We talked about this in a story we previously did where Chemistry may be one of the first sites to start actually doing this.

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch did a guest post at TechCrunch about how the niche dating sites market share is growing fast while the top 5 sites for the most part are losing ground. The top 5 dating sites in market share, according to Hitwise are:

1. Singlesnet
2. Plentyoffish
3. True
4. Yahoo Personals
5. Match

These top 5 sites lost 7% of their overall market share when comparing Match 2008, with a year ago.

New Ads

As per this recent story, Chemistry.com to Spend $40M on TV Ads, it looks like Chemistry.com new TV ads called "Chemistry Vows" will be coming to a TV near you. The four new commercials will appear on the NBC network along with Bravo, HGTV, TBS and A&E. After viewing the commercials and seeing the list of networks the commercials will be aired on, Chemistry is definitely targeting the 30 and older crowd. This makes sense since Chemistry is all about the long term relationship, something that most 20 to 29 year olds are not looking for yet, either do to school or job advancement, etc.

New Feature

To improve members experience with online dating, Chemistry has added the feature "You've Been Noticed". This feature allows members to find out who has viewed their profile. According to Chemistry:

The online Jewish dating service JDate has been selected as an Official Honoree in the Social Networking category for this years Webby Awards. This is the 12th year for the awards. The Webby Awards recognize websites that are superior in quality and sets standards on the internet. To get your site nominated in the Webby Awards is very difficult, your website must stand out in all categories including functionality, usability and the over look of the site. According to the awards website:

Of the more than 10,000 entries submitted to the 12th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree.

The one thing I was surprised about was JDate was put in the Social Networking category. Since there is no Online Dating category listed at the Webby Awards I guess it was the closest match. A press release by JDate also calls their site an online community. While this is true, JDate's primary focus is still online dating. The community is a result of the dating. As social networking sites try to take away dating site members (just take a look at all the new dating applications available at MySpace and Facebook), dating sites are now including more social networking features to lure these members back and then some.

Read our review for more information on JDate, the online Jewish Community.

After the article “Navigating the One Night Stand” was published about a week and a half ago on eHarmony and through their newsletter angry members started to voice their opinions on blogs and/or cancel their memberships. The article described what to do if "you're a swinging single and you've had a one-night stand" and what the etiquette was after the fling. This article was a far departure from eHarmony and their Advice Blog which normally promotes long term relationships and Christian values.

On April 21, 2008, Stan Holt, Vice President of eHarmony published an apology on eHarmony Advice for the “Navigating the One Night Stand” article. In it Stan Holt states:

The advice contained in this column was completely inconsistent with our editorial guidelines and the relationship service that we offer to our members. The day after sending the e-mail newsletter, I was made aware of the column and it was immediately removed from our site.

It's not often you get an apology from a company and it shows eHarmony realized the mistake and they value their members enough to put an apology in writing. Most other companies making a similar mistake may have removed the article but I am sure most wouldn't have put up an apology.

You can find more information about the retraction and the complete text for the article “Navigating the One Night Stand” at the unofficial eHarmony Blog. For more general information about eHarmony, please read our review.