General News

From this Press Release, Lavalife announced the launching of a free Canadian online city guide. Called Where to Go, this guide currently has entries for 5 major Canadian cities. The cities are Toronto Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. When you visit the site once you have selected the the city, you can then view different restaurants, bars and attractions that are recommended places to take your date. For the more serious relationships there is also a travel, spa and hotel guide.

This is a good idea for probably about 20% of the singles meeting online. Most people look for matches in or near their city where both parties already know the local hot spots. This will be used more for people traveling to meet someone in a city they are both familiar with. It is much better to surprise your date than asking him or her where they would like to go. What would be nice to see is members of Lavalife make recommendations. This way you would probably get a lot more of the smaller restaurants and bars that can offer a more cosy and romantic atmosphere.

FriendFinder does something similar to the Where to Go guide but, it is actually built right into the dating site. FriendFinder goes a step further by offering member recommendations, reviews and ratings on their listings.

Match.com added keyword searching early last year, (see story) and now ChristianMingle.com has followed suit. A keyword search at Christian Mingle allows you to search for certain words in other members profile essays. This can be done along with specifying other normal search criteria. I am glad more dating sites are adding this search feature, as it is a big help in narrowing your results, especially if your interests are unique.

I just can't help and wonder why this wasn't a part of all dating sites long ago. Most online dating services have text areas where you can type your own words. These essays are an excellent source of information about the person and it only makes sense to allow them to be searchable.

For more information about ChristianMingle.com, check our our review.

The New York Times is reporting that Spark Networks is up for sale. Spark Networks owns a large number of dating services (probably close to 20) with their flagship dating sites being AmericanSingles.com, BBWPersonalsPlus.com, and JDate (in order of size). According to comScore Media, the Spark Networks of dating sites are the 4th largest with 2.45 million visitors in November, 2007. Yahoo! Personals had the most visitors on the metrix with 4.23 million people for that month. This comparison is slightly unfair to other dating services since, the Spark Network is made up of a group of different dating sites. Still AmericanSingles.com did have 1.20 million visitors for November which is still a very large number of people and sales.

With shares (LOV) closing at $4.90 yesterday this gives the company a value of $131.4 million. Some Analysts predict that it may go for as high as $185 million, especially since the share price has risen close to 20% in the last few weeks. Spark Networks are in talks with companies that own related sites like MySpace, Match.com, eHarmony and Yahoo! Personals too see if interest in a sale can be generated.

Recently there was another dating network sold for the tune of $300 million, see the story here.

According to Canoe, woman in a Canadian study are reluctant to admit they meet men online. Apparently the woman from the study feel online dating is socially denigrating, even if they have had extremely meaningful experience with it. I find this a little surprising and would suspect, maybe woman who are 35 or over may have a little problem admitting the fact. One reason I see is, they did not grow up using the internet and still view it with suspension. Most older woman I know who are using online dating services where indecisive at first about using them but, just after a few days they jumped right on board. These woman now (over 50) have no problem talking about the men they met online; in fact they enjoy talking about the people they meet.

With New Years Eve just past and Valentines Day just a month and a half away this marks the busiest time period for online dating sites. Singles are either fulfilling their New Years resolution to take time out of their hectic lives to find love or, they want to find someone before the day of expressing love, Valentines Day. Several dating services such as Match.com, eHarmony and PerfectMatch.com all start major advertising campaigns or increase spending in advertising this month to try and capture these additional online daters. This marketing is done mainly via both the internet and with TV commercials. Most dating sites hope to get at least a 15% increase in singles signing up for their service.

An article by the Seattle Times has a few more statistics for you about dating in the month of January. Mark Brooks from OnlinePersonalsWatch.com is quoted in this article as well.

BBW Personals Plus has finally improved their mailbox interface. They now have included Mail, Smiles (same as winks or interests) and Cards all in the same interface by using tabs. It is now setup much like Microsoft Outlook with your folders on the right, mail menu options across the top and with the main viewing pane in the middle-right. Mail messages can now have icons and different assigned html templates. You can now also create different folders to store your messages in, and to go along with this is drag and drop message management. Shortcut keys are also availabe to keep tasks simple and fast.

For our review on BBW Personals Plus, click here.