General News

The MiamiHerald.com talks about Florida's new ''Internet predator awareness and online safety act''. The bill would require online dating services serving Florida to:

disclose online and by e-mail whether or not it conducts a criminal background check. If it does, it must tell the consumer that background checks are "fallible."

This is similar to a bill New Jersey recently passed called the Internet Dating Safety Act.

Once again True.com is trying to push this bill through. They already do background checks on its members. Both Yahoo! Personals and Match.com are reluctant to do criminal background checks since they are reported to be unreliable. I agree with a statement that a Yahoo! lobbyist made regarding True's push on internet dating legislation:

"This doesn't have to do with online predators as the bill says," said Bill Ashworth, a lobbyist with Yahoo! "This is a food fight between True.com and the rest of the Internet dating industry."

I don't think True is doing this for the safety of their members, I believe it has more to do with publicity and getting there name mentioned in news articles.

Online Personals Watch has a post regarding Match.com matchMobile service going live on Alltel and the US Cellular networks. With matchMobile you can do most things on your cell phone that you can do on the actual Match.com dating site. This includes searching for singles and replying and sending emails. See our review for more details.

MatchMobile is available in the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico, India and Thailand.

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?