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eHarmony recently received a complaint in a letter from eRecruitment which stated that the dating site is infringing on their patents. eRecruitment is a job search site based in the United Kingdom that hold several patents which deal with classifying and indexing a website's members personal information. In the letter, eRecruitment told eHarmony to either shut down their dating site or start paying licensing fees.

eHarmony’s attorneys from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe asked Judge Paul Friedman at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to declare that the company had not infringed on patents owned by eRecruitment.

In my opinion this looks like someone who just wants to make a quick buck off of eHarmony. In the unlikely case that eRecruitment ends up successfully suing eHarmony, then all dating sites would be in trouble. Of course we have seen frivolous claims like this before. I forget who the company was but, there was one a few years ago that was attempting to sue any website who streamed video over the internet.

For more on the story, read The Blog of LegalTimes.

Starting Saturday July 25th, when members of eHarmony logged into their accounts, they found a message about a new feature and profile questions. There are 7 new questions which focus on commonalities. The multiple choice questions look at common traits that include things like your approach to money and food, cleanliness and humor. Once completed you can then see how your commonalities compare with other members when you view their profiles. While these questions are part of your profile, they are not taken into account when you are automatically matched with other members by eHarmony. That is what the other 256 profile questions are for.

Be careful when you fill out the commonality questions, as it looks right now, you cannot edit the answers once you have saved them.

To find out more details about this matchmaking service, read our review of eHarmony.

It looks like our friends over at the Unofficial eHarmony Blog have had their DNS hacked. If you visit their website now, you will be redirected to a site called mybookface (which obviously plays off of Facebook). Unfortunately popular blogs are constantly targeted by hackers. I hope they get their site backup soon as it is a great resource for eHarmony members.

If you are reading this post and would like more information on the dating service eHarmony, check out our in depth review.

Update #1: As of August 7 the site is still down. Hopefully someone from the Unofficial eHarmony Blog can comment on this story and give us an update when things should get back to normal.

Update #2: As of August 8 the blog is back online, sort of. They seem to be having some display and template issues.

I notice the other day that eHarmony has now hidden their traffic statistics over at Quantcast. This is what you see now:

On eHarmony's Quantcast profile page you still get to see the US demographics and how many unique visitors they had last month but, the daily traffic and trends graphs are not available to the general public anymore. eHarmony first became Quantified by Quantcast last summer (see Story). A website being Quantified means that Quantcast directly measured the traffic data. It is not based on estimates as other sites may be on Quantcast and other traffic measuring services like Alexa, Comscore and Compete.

Over the last year eHarmony has become a much more open dating service, they have started several blogs and answered customer complaints in their forums. I hope that the fact, eHarmony has hid their daily traffic statistics, it is not a sign that they may have decided to reverse this trend.

For more on this matchmaking service, read our eHarmony review.

The Unofficial eHarmony Blog pointed out that there is now a Official eHarmony Blog. The blog is titled Open Communication, and is named after the final step in eHarmony's 5 step communication process. In the first post Pam Holmgren, the eHarmony Director for Corporate Communications, introduces herself as the official blogger. She further states that with this blog she hopes to create a safe and trusted environment where people can learn more about eHarmony. Since July 14, 2009 we have seen 5 posts with no real new information about eHarmony, at least from a dating industry point of view. I hope eHarmony does communicate more about how their matchmaking service works from the inside and doesn't end up making the blog purely a marketing tool.

If you are interested in the eHarmony Blog, then you may also want to know that you can view actual verified eHarmony visitor traffic statistics at Quantcast (see Story).

Click here to visit the official corporate blog and for more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review.

Christine makes a good point in this article from the Palm Beach Post. Certain profile preferences on dating sites shouldn't be negotiable. This will differ from person to person but most singles would agree that their view on how much they want their potential partner drinking and/or smoking will not change, especially if the person says NEVER. Usually they have a very good reason.

In Christine's case she is a recovering alcoholic and she had told eHarmony that she didn't want a match who drinks. After only a few matches from eHarmony, she received an email from the dating site suggesting she widen her match preferences in regards to drinking, to someone who may have a drink at least once a week. Obviously this would not work for someone like Christine.

I think dating sites like eHarmony which are designed to match singles based on complex matching system need to take into account the deal breakers every person has when it comes to being partnered with someone. For me it is smoking, for someone one else it may be location or religion. eHarmony should realize asking someone to modify a matching preference which may be a core belief could lead to upset customers.