General News

FriendFinder has listed several job openings here. They include a Senior Perl Programming and Flash ActionScript Programming openings plus a Senior Web Analytics Expert. Salaries for these job postings seem higher than the industry average and include several perks and up to $5000 in relocation costs.

The Web Analytics Expert position is a relatively new position in the industry. The larger internet companies now have specialized employees looking at the mounds of web traffic data they have. These people are analyzing this data with the goals of improving the customers experience and to find new avenues of revenue for the company. This is now a crucial job position in all companies that sell a product or service on the internet.

On a side note, when did FriendFinder start with pop under page web advertising? It must have been recently and I don't remember them doing this before. None of their other dating sites I checked are doing this now. They should stop this practice as it annoys people and most browsers now days have built in popup blockers built-in anyways.

In 1965 the first computer dating service called Operation Match was born at Wesleyan. Questionnaires where sent to college campuses all over the United States where students would answer questions about their physical appearance, interests and their ideal date using a scale of 1 to 5. The students would then send in their answers along with a $3 fee. The answers where then transferred to computer punch cards which a Avco 1790 read. There were thousands of responses and it took about 6 weeks to create lists of matches for all applicants. The list of matches where then mailed back to the students.

For more information on Operation Match check out The New York Times article called, Computing the Mysteries of Attraction.

eHarmony has added free Icebreakers to their dating service. This allows non-paying and paying members to pick from 11 predetermined short messages and send it to their matches. Icebreakers include simple messages like, "Great pic…love to see more photos!". This type of feature has been used for a long time on other dating services so it is in no way a revolutionary thing but, I do think eHarmony needed to add them.

What Icebreakers do (and this has always been a major complaint with eHarmony members) is it gives free members the ability to see if their matches are currently using eHarmony and are not just potentially old profiles of members who don't log in anymore. If the new members has a match they really like, by sending an Icebreaker and getting a reply back they know it's an active profile and it will be most likely worth signing up to the service to pursue the communication. The only problem here is that eHarmony choices for Icebreakers are rather limited. Replying to an Icebreaker with any of eHarmony's current list of Icebreakers doesn't make sense. Most of the Icebreakers either ask a question or want you to do something like talk or request a picture, so there is no real way to say yes or no to a Icebreaker question.

Icebreakers will also give eHarmony more paying members in the long run for the same reason stated above. This is the second major feature eHarmony has added in the last few months. They obviously are feeling the competition from other serious matching sites like Chemistry and PerfectMatch.com. I wonder what else they have up there sleeve?

Related Story: eHarmony Members can now see "Who Has Viewed Me"

The latest technology article at Times Online focuses on what makes a good user or screen name at an online dating site. Dr Monica Whitty at Nottingham Trent University looked into what makes a name rank higher among both men and woman daters and therefore make them more likely to initiate contact.

Dr. Whitty study found male singles would less likely try to contact a woman with nick names like "welleducated" or "wellread". The reverse was found to be true for woman. Woman where more likely to contact men who's screen name suggested intelligence. In my view, I don't think this would necessarily be a bad thing if a woman had a more cultured oriented user name. It may put off some males from contacting them but the woman who would use these types of name most likely wouldn't be attracted to these men anyways.

The findings listed in the Times article was presented at the British Psychological Society's annual conference yesterday.

While I am not a "Dancing with the Stars" fan, I know a lot of people are! Dr. Pepper Schwartz, PerfectMatch.com chief relationship expert appeared on "Dancing with the Stars" last Tuesday (April 1). She talked about the compatibility tests the dancing couples took before the competition started. She also reveals who she thinks will win the competition based on her assessment of all the DUET compatibility tests. Kristi Yamaguchi and Mark Ballas are Dr. Pepper Schwartz most compatible couple. You can read more at ABC News with Dr. Pepper Schwartz breakdown of each couple.

Perfect Match got a lot of press from this well integrated marketing campaign. People like to know how they compare to the stars and they also like to know how the stars compare to each other. What better way to do this than use a dating services matching system. Dr. Pepper Schwartz also appeared on most of the popular TV entertainment shows like Entertainment Tonight on Wednesday promoting Perfect Match and her "Dancing with the Stars" couples analysis.

On a related note, you can also find a Duet Total Compatibility analysis of the anchors Diane Sawyer, Robin Robertson and Chris Cuomo from "Good Morning America" here.

Read our review to find out more about Perfect Match.

I notice over at Yahoo! Personals that they have 14 different job position openings with categories ranging from User Experience and Design, Engineering, Marketing and Business Development and Finance. Each position has an in depth description of what you would be required to do at the job and what schooling and work experience you must have. There is also a link so you can apply online. So if you are a Designer, a web developer or a Product Manager why don't you give Yahoo a try?

On a side note, if you are a web developer and get the job at Yahoo Personals, the first thing you can work on is the "Things not looking quite right?" notification I received when viewing the job openings page. I am using Internet Explorer 7, one of the browsers Yahoo Personals does recommend!