General News

I just put the finishing touches on our E-Cyrano Dating Profile Makeover Review. I looked into about 6 different profile essay makeover services before deciding to do a write up for E-Cyrano. They seemed to be by far the best and most professional online service of this kind out there. The owner, Evan Marc Katz also is very knowledgeable about the dating industry and has appeared in a variety of popular TV talk shows.

If you are thinking that you need some pointers or a complete professional rewrite of those two essay profile question that ask about you, and the match you are looking for, you may want to consider E-Cyrano. It's a little pricey for the service but I think you will be happy with the end results.

It looks like Single Parent Love Life (or SPILL for short) has gone out of business. There is a plain text message on their website which announces with regret that they have closed its doors indefinitely and that all outstanding subscriptions have been cancelled. No more information has been given.

The website open its doors just over a year ago to cater too the single parents niche dating scene. It was a well designed website run by a bunch of smart people. Mitch Solway was part of Single Parent Love Life. His previous job was VP of Marketing over at Lavalife. He helped lead that dating service from $3 million in revenue to over $100 million in the 9 years he was there. I'm not sure what happened, but as everyone knows the online dating industry is a competitive business and you need some deep pockets in the first few years for marketing and to help drive in traffic to your site.

There are two main types of dating services free trial memberships. The first and most popular one usually allows singles to create a members account and a dating profile plus perform searches for other members. You most likely will be able to view these profiles in detail as well but the main thing you can't do is communicate with other members. This would include emailing, instant messaging, chatting and usually winks.

The second type of free trial allows the dating site member to do everything the first trial offers plus the ability to communicate. They usually have the run of the entire dating site for free with the only exception of it being limited, is by time. These trials usually last either 1, 3 or 7 days. Most of these types of free dating site trials require you to enter a credit card number before you can receive the trial membership. The dating service doesn't bill you for anything during the trial but once it is over they will then bill you for a membership (usually a one month membership).

Are these dating trial memberships worth it? The first type definitely is since it allows you to see how the site works and view what members they have. The second type is as well in most cases, since it allows you to see how active the members are in communicating. It also helps to get a week free if you plan on signing up anyways to the service. With this type of time limited dating trial membership you should read the billing details and/or terms of service carefully to see how to terminate the membership, if it doesn't meet with your expectations. With most of the major dating services this usually requires you to visit the membership's accounts page and either clicking off auto renew or clicking a resignation checkbox or button before the expiry of the free trial.

What you have to be concerned with sometimes is some dating sites (none do this that I know of in which we have currently listed in our reviews) can sometimes make you jump though hoops to cancel a trial membership. This can include things like having the membership cancel button in a hard to find spot, actually calling a certain number, too one instance that I heard of having to actually fax in your cancelation. By reading the terms of service before hand of the dating site and by doing a little research on the net into the dating site itself should help you avoid these few bad apples.

The major dating sites like Match.com, Date.com and Yahoo! Personals do require you to enter a credit card number for the full free trials but they do make it simple to opt out of the membership if you want to cancel.

Moneyhighstreet.com posted a news item about the costs of dating in Britain. In it they refer to the NS&I Quarterly Savings Survey in which men believe they pay on average 60% more than women on dating in a year. In total British men expect to pay about £12 billion on dating this year with woman only spending £4.5 billion. This translates to about £50 per date for men and close to £30 for woman.

Across the pond, I think these statistics hold true here in North America. Most dating men I know spend about $100 on a typical date. This includes the cab ride, dinner and usually a movie afterwards. Of course, more and more woman are picking up the tab but in most cases it's still the mans job to pay (at least in my age group mid 30's). I wonder if this is different for the 20 somethings?

I've decided to do a little more research of my own on the Better Business Bureau in regards to dating sites. This was after seeing an article about rising complaints (see Increased Complaints Registered Against Dating Services).

First a bit more on how the BBB works. To do a BBB search on a company visit their home page. The best way I found to find dating sites was to type in the domain name without the www prefix. Just a note here, most free or small dating sites are not found on the BBB. Once you have initiated a search, a list of companies may then come up. Some have nothing to do with what you are looking for while others may deal with separate branches or offices of the company. As an example, do a search on "yahoo.com" and you will get 22 results. Another thing to remember (which I didn't realize at first) is a company doesn't have to be a member to have a report on them. Actual BBB members are denoted with an icon and usually contain a lot more information than companies that are not members. When you click on the name of the company it will bring you to the report page of the company on the local Better Business Bureau website. These local BBB websites are not all the same and some have a lot more information available than others. All the information I am giving below seems to be how most of the BBB websites display their information. Some BBB sites like the one serving Los Angeles displays the information differently. They grade the company and actually shows some or all of the customers complaints. This seems to be an update to the service and may be how other BBB sites will soon follow.

I saw OmniDate.com mentioned in the news recently. The twist to this dating site (every new site needs a gimmick these days) is you can go on virtual dates with your matches. You can pick from a variety of virtual dates which is represented as different animated backgrounds. You also have several detailed 3D characters to pick from which represent you in your conversations.

The graphics look good, though the window is a little small (at least at my monitor's resolution). The main problem is I don't really see this as virtual dating. The characters look good but there are not that many choices. So, if you go out on several virtual dates you may end up seeing double. OmniDate also needs to bring in audio chatting. You can make the characters express different emotions like laughing (with sounds) but all the chatting is done via the keyboard and comic book text bubbles. In the end I see this more as a fun text chatting tool.

I think virtual dating needs to represent the actual person with live voice and video. At this point they could put you in different settings like a restaurant or bar complete with appropriate sound effects. Also, when I here the word virtual I tend to think of those glasses that you can wear with tiny screens that can track your head movement. When you look around it feels like you are in actually there in the virtual environment. It needs to be something that offers true emersion with an actual representation of the person you are talking too. We are a long way off technology wise before this happens.

The closest thing to virtual dating at the moment is live video and audio chat. A lot of speed dating sites have this type of system setup. I haven't looked much into speed dating yet since it really hasn't caught on in the internet world yet but, David over at Online Dating Insider has been testing them out recently and has a few good posts about them.