General News

Over on Online Personals Watch, Mark Brooks has posted an interview he did with Yahoo! Personals new GM, Egon Smola. They talk mainly about some of the new tweaks and features of Yahoo! Personals. One such tweak of the website is, now requiring people to create a profile first at Yahoo before they can view other singles profiles. This is part of the free membership and the overall goal here is to get more profiles online. Many of the other popular dating services require this as well when viewing a dating profile. You can still perform searches on Yahoo and see profile summaries without having to login. The other interesting subject of the interview Mark and Egon discussed dealt with where internet dating may be headed in the future.

An article on Oprah's website called Dating Older Women: Does Age Matter? asks an important dating question of our more enlighten society. With recent Hollywood marriages matching such celebrities as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher (who is 15 years younger) this seems too becoming a much more acceptable trend. Men have long been able to marry much younger woman without the scrutiny which older woman receives when they marry a younger man.

The article is very informative and breaks things down into 3 main areas. It points out why this trend is happening now (such shows as Sex and the City), why it may have taken so long to catch on and some of the fears woman have when it happens to them. As always Oprah does a good job at bringing the facts to her audience.

My take on things? I don't have a real problem with either men or woman marrying much older partners. As long as they are both happy. I just have to wonder about the gender gap. With couples who have a over 10 years age difference, life perspective on things must differ and you tend to wonder about what they have in common. I also would worry about when the couple reaches ages beyond 60. A relative active partner at the age of 65 could then be married to someone who is 75 or even older and this person would most likely be in a much different stage in life.

The New York Times has published an article regarding Chemistry.com new attack ads on eHarmony. Chemistry will be launching ads this week in newspapers and magazines which strike out at eHarmony for not accepting gay members. eHarmony counters Chemistry.com's attacks by stating:

eHarmony's matching system is based on psychological data collected from heterosexual married couples, and we have not offered a service for those seeking same-sex matches. Nothing precludes us from offering a same-sex service in the future, but it's not a service we offer now.

You may remember, last April Chemistry did a similar ad campaign called "Rejected by eHarmony". They spent $20 million on that campaign which helped raise their membership levels by 80% and gay members have increased by will over 200%. Currently it is estimated that Chemistry has 3.7 million registered members and eHarmony has 17 million members.

I notice eHarmony is running a Free Communication Weekend again this year from December 27th until December 30th, 2007. This free trial allows you to communicate with as many singles on eHarmony who are pre-screened for compatibility with you. This trial automatically starts when you signup and is available for both American and Canadian singles. For the last few days eHarmony has also been running some TV commercials in both countries advertising the Free Communication Weekend.

For more information on this dating service, please read our eHarmony Review.

It seems like the term "Dating 2.0" is becoming a new catch phrase. It has appeared in some recent online dating articles from such popular websites as Wired and Time. Techcrunch seems to have started it all with an article from last year about thirteen sites that supposedly offer high tech features (at least that is what the title would suggest). There are some good sites listed in the article but most of them have very small user base and seem to just concentrate on one small unique feature that would seem almost to be a fad rather than a useful tool for matching potential couples online. I guess only time will tell.

As with the term "Web 2.0", which means a second generation of websites that have evolved to offer a more interactive and an over all better web site, I would assume Dating 2.0 refers to the second generation of dating websites which offers a much improved online dating experience. In my opinion dating sites that offer just a classifieds approach to dating would be Dating 1.0 (see this [story: News-Yahoo-Personals-Home-Page-1998 story] for an example of Yahoo in 1998). Dating 2.0 sites would offer such features as messaging, video and text chatting and complex matching software. If we use these criteria, Dating 2.0 has been around for over 5 years now and almost all popular dating services today would be a part of the 2.0 category.

So in reality we are not waiting for the Dating 2.0 generation anymore, it has already been here for a while. We are now waiting for the 3rd evolution of online dating and what it will bring to the dating experience. I have the perfect name for it, we can call it Dating 3.0 ;-)

Yahoo! Personals is another online dating service which has seen several updates this past year. Susan Mernit has pointed out in her blog that the Yahoo! Personals home page for members who have signed in has had a makeover. The updated page is much more clean looking and has a much better use of colour that its previous incarnation. Dating features and activities that need to pop out to the viewer do. The use of simplified graphic icons beside the different menu items not only catches the eye but helps explain what the link is for. Good job Yahoo.