General News

CBS 5 is reporting that one of the largest dating sites, Match.com is about too debut an application with everyone's favorite social networking site, Facebook. The application is called "Little Black Book" and it allows Facebook users to see other Facebook users and Match.com members who wish to date. With this application you can also share your matches with any of your Facebook friends. The other key feature is, users of Facebook with the Little Black Book don't necessary have to be members of Match.com. The reason for this is the application is a new paying service for Match.com. Once you have your matches, It will allow Facebook users to contact other users on a "pay per contact" basis instead of the regular monthly subscription which Match.com itself offers. At this point I would assume, if you are a member of the Match.com dating site you would not have to pay this fee. The Little Black Book also allows you to purchase keys to unlock a potential match for a friend. This feature ties in nicely with Match.com other new feature this week, matchmyFriends. Match My Friends allows people to create a dating profile for their friends (with the friends permission of course). We will have more information on matchmyFriends in another story. (UPDATE - Story now available here)

As everyone knows, social networking on the internet is huge. Sites like Facebook and MySpace have made it very popular. Facebook itself has an estimated 58 million users, while Match.com themselves have over 15 million. With the rise of social networking sites internet gurus expected dating sites to decline. In fact the opposite is true. Internet Dating has never been more popular. Singles like the dedicated service and features which dating sites offers. Plus, you know people on a dating site are actively looking for a relationship, on Social Networking sites a large percentage are not.

Allowing Facebook users to access Match.com's features is a very smart move on the part of Match.com and opens the door to more potential customers. IMO it should work out well just as long as Match.com doesn't charge too much to Facebook users to contact a match through the Little Black Book application.

The Facebook Little Black Book application is expected to launch next week, for more information on Match.com read our review.

Last month we reported this story, Rumor - FriendFinder purchased for $1 Billion?. Well it turns out that most of the rumor is true according to the New York Times. The FriendFinder Network was sold but for $500 million. There are over 25 sites in the FriendFinder Network with about a total of 1.2 million paying subscribers out of 260 million members. The projected profits of the network is estimated to be $340 million this year.

Some more of the popular sites in the FriendFinder Network includes their first site created, FriendFinder.com and Passion.com geared towards adults.

We have just introduced a new dating category for our award winners. The new category is called:

🏆Award Winning Dating

This category represents the current year's recipients for the Dating Sites Reviews Choice Awards. For more information on the awards please visit our Awards topic or the new category to view the recipients directly.

First eHarmony, the dating site, got its start in 2000. Then in 2006 eHarmony launched its eHarmony Marriage site with its goal to help people to create better and stronger marriages. I notice recently on eHarmony's site that they had launched eHarmony Parenting this past summer. This is a free resource to help and guide parents to raise happy and healthy children. The site contains mainly articles which are arranged by topics like Anger, Discipline and Medical. There are 20 topics in total and the contributors all seem to have professional backgrounds that would make them an expert in this area. If you visit this site don't expect a large number of articles but, the ones they do have are informative.

Why did eHarmony create a resource for parents? Single Parents make up a large part of the online dating market and eHarmony is tapping into this by offering single Moms and Dads a free resource on parenting.

For more on eHarmony read our review. For parenting information visit eHarmony Parenting.

Ha, I noticed on the Online Dating Insider (a blog for people who work in the Dating Industry) that David has an article on Date.com's new Blog Widgets. These Blog Widgets are actually quizzes. The available quizzes include "How addicted are you to Online Dating?" and a "Hot or Not Calculator". Once you take a quiz they will give you the code to put on a blog if you have one. Dave only scored a 45% and he thought that was low since he spends a large amount of time using online dating sites. I took the test as well and I scored a 45%! I spend a fair bit of time using online dating sites but only from the point of reviewing the dating service and checking in from time to time to see any new features and what has changed. So in this regard, some of the questions I answered pertaining to how often I change my profile and photo, would have lowered my overall score.

You can see our Date.com Review here for more information on this dating service.

Just a note for all of you ChristianCafe.com members out there. The ChristanCafe.com have updated their site with improved navigation. A new dropdown menu system has been added to allow members to access more pages of the site in just one click. Some regular menu items have also been moved for a better flow of the interface.

Check our our review of ChristianCafe.com for more information.