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I probably get close to 200 emails a year from owners of dating and related sites who want me to promote one thing or another. Only a handful ever catch my interest and the website "Why was I Dissed?" is one of them. It is a well designed website that offers 2 services. You can get dating advice by Dr. Craig April, a licensed psychologists in Los Angeles and (this is what caught my eye) you can try to find out why someone who you where talking to online just stopped with no explanation. Receiving advice about dating online is nothing new and their are many websites that offer this service but, finding out why someone stopped answering your emails, this is the first time I have seen this.

How does it work? It is pretty simple. You start an Investigation in which you give a few details about yourself, including your name, age and gender. You also choose the type of relationship you had and explain in more detail on how you know the person. You also include the persons email address and name with whom you where in contact with (they call them the Avoiders). From here WhyWasIDissed.com will attempt to contact the Avoiders through email. Here is a quote from the website:

After beginning your investigation, FREE OF CHARGE, we will contact the communication avoider with your investigation case number. They will be asked a series of personalized questions accompanied with multiple-choice answers and fill in the blank options. Once they’ve responded, we will let you know the results immediately.

If no response is forth coming WhyWasIDissed.com will then send a second email. If no response is heard within two weeks it is then assumed the Avoider will not.

When someone stops responding to your emails you are always left wondering why? Will a third party service work as a mediator to find this answer out? I'm not sure but, it is an interesting idea. The Avoiders may feel more comfortable explaining themselves in a structured manner but then again, they may be horrified that a third party knows about a failed relationship. As mentioned in the quote, Investigation are currently free but the website does say only for a limited time. I'm not sure when they will start charging and how much. IMHO WhyWasIDissed.com should keep it free since they are already charging for dating advice. I think the "Why was I Dissed?" service, could possibly be made into a great web viral marketing tool for the dating advice part of the website.

There have been a bunch of posts about the new dating service IntelligentPeople.com. The twist here is you must take and pass an IQ test before you can join the website. IntelligentPeople.com is designed for singles who score in the top 15% of the population in terms of IQ. Potential members will have the option to take the test only twice. The IQ test is made up of multiple choice questions and image pattern recognition testing. It is designed to test logical intelligence while minimising educational or cultural biases.

This is an interesting idea. With most other dating sites the only real way to gauge intelligence of their members is to view how well their profile is written and what education level (high school diploma, college degree, etc..) they have . Both of these are not a real indication of intelligence and only education level can be searched on.

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: