General News

According to the Guardian there are 141 online dating services in Britain with over 13% of UK internet surfers (of all ages) visiting these sites. What surprised me was the average age of members on these dating sites, 44 - 55. I guess more young people in Britain are using sites such as My Space. Of course people are starting to grumble about My Space, with all the ads and fake profile pages, and it has helped them by being put on Time's 5 worst site list.

Britains largest online dating service, DatingDirect.com has inked a deal with Vodafone UK to include it's dating service with their mobile internet service. Through this service you will be able to access DatingDirect.com and perform searches, browse profiles and receive alerts when you have singles view your profile and send you mail.

Lavalife plans to represent the brighter side of Online Dating in its new upcoming TV commercials. They will list positive aspects as well as the message that online dating actually works.

Read more about the commercials and Lavalifes message at MarketingMag.ca.

It looks like Yahoo! is planning some major updates in the future for their dating service. The first off the block deals with photo's. Members now can add up to 10 photo's in the new interface along with the ability to add in captions. The idea here is singles can now show off more of their life and what they like to do. In my opinion the major part of this update is the ability to search the photo captions. This is an excellent source of information. If some single is looking for other singles who enjoy biking (as example) and they have a photo of them doing this, the person executing the search knows he or she is serious about biking. Most dating profiles don't let you gauge the seriousness of your interests and you never know if it's just a passing interest or a full blown passion.

This update to Yahoo! Personals has been needed for a while. Most dating sites have been allowing 10 or more photo's with captions for a long time. These dating sites even have extra features like private photo galleries and simple photo editing features like removing red eye. A point for Yahoo though, they are the first that I know of which allows searching of photo captions.

I wonder what they have in store for their members next on Yahoo! Personals?

I notice this article on Online Dating Insider, it looks like Match.com now requires you to sign up for a free membership before you can perform searches or view any profiles. While I understand they are doing this to increase membership numbers, I think the increase in singles creating fake profiles or people just moving on and not signing up would be a bigger loss to Match. Most singles do join multiple dating sites (according to our polls) but I would think they like to perform searches to see if there are potential matches close to home before investing time in creating a quality dating profile.

Should be interesting to see if Match.com does this still in 6 months.

Well, was the NBC show, "Science of Love" successful? Adam Johnson did pick PerfectMatches choice over his own at the end. Online reviews have been mixed for the show and unfortunately I missed it (my PVR was full, anyone have a link to the show?)

I wonder if this special will turn into a full show, I guess that all depends on the number of viewers.

I received an email from Relationship.com. They are changing their name to ChristianMingle.com to make it easier for people to realize what type of single Relationship.com is trying to attract.

For the last year or so Relationships.com has been the most visited Christian dating site according to Hitwise. Hitwise is a company that keeps track of how many people visit web sites and then ranks them accordingly.

I guess this means I'll have to update my review of Relationship.com to reflect the new name change. I should have another look at this dating site anyways since it's been a while and I like to review each site at least once every 6 months.