Canada

eHarmony in Canada is offering free communication this weekend. It starts today, Friday May 18th and runs straight until Monday May 21st, 2012. This weekend is also a long weekend for Canadians since Monday is the Victoria Day holiday. This is also the first holiday of the season which marks the beginning of summer for most Canadians.

As with other free communication weekends at eHarmony, all you need to do to participate is become a member. You can join for free and create a profile. Once this is complete you will receive your first matches and then be able to begin the communication process with your selections. No credit card is required. This promotion does not include viewing photos, Secure Call or Skip to Email.

For more about this popular North American dating service for singles looking to find a long-term relationship you can read our review of eHarmony.

An article from Canoe took a look at online dating statistics in Canada.

From a cross-Canada survey conducted by Leger Marketing, they concluded the following points:

• 25 percent of Canadians have tried online dating. The percentage rises to 36 percent if you look at people between the ages of 18 and 34 (much higher than in 2009)
• Still, the majority of people do not plan to try online dating as 69 percent of them said that it is not likely they could find love online
• 64 percent of singles using online dating say that common interests is the most important factor when looking for a match
• 49 percent of singles using online dating say that physical characteristics from photos and videos is the most important factor when choosing a match
• 39 percent of all the Canadians surveyed said that they actually read over all of the information provided in a dating profile

Online dating has seen a huge increase in popularity in the last few years in Canada and the rest of the world. According to the Canadian owned dating site Plenty Of Fish, they have seen a 40 percent increase in memberships over the last 2 years. Plenty Of Fish currently has 33 million registered users from around the world.

Match.com (Match.ca in Canada) is now powering online dating at Yahoo! Canada. Yahoo in the United States has been using Match.com since May of 2010 (see Story). Previously Lavalife had partnered with Yahoo! Canada to provide online dating to their visitors (see Story).

To find out more about this dating site you can check out our Match.com review.

According to the blog "Breaking the online dating sound barrier”, the dating site Plenty Of Fish only accepts users from Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. I did try creating a new user from China and I didn't have any problems (I had the account deleted), so POF must check the IP of the user to see what country it is from before they allow them to register.

The other bit of news about Plenty Of Fish is, it now supports 4 languages. Before now the site was only available in English. As of a few days ago French, German and Spanish versions can be accessed with an Italian version coming soon. This means any text from the user interface (menus, links, etc.) along with all help and information pages are available in the language. The only thing that doesn't get converted is any text a user may have typed for profile fields like the About Me section.

For more information on this story you can check out Fernando's Blog and to find out more about this dating site you can read our Plentyoffish.com review.

The custom of arranged marriage is very popular in India but in countries like the United States and Canada it is not popular. In North America when a match could not be found locally, families from India and other Asian countries sometimes resorted to using newspaper classified sections to find a potential suitor for one of their children. This practice has now changed thanks to online dating. Dating sites like Shaadi.com have matched more than a million South Asian couples and now parents are logging on to find potential matches for their children. Many parents find "religion, mother tongue, residency status, education, caste or class, astrological sign and diet" important attributes in a mate for their child. Shaadi.com does keep track of this information within member profiles which makes it easy for parents to find matches. Roughly 20 percent of profiles on Shaadi were created by parents looking for a partner for one or more of their children. The average age of a profile is in the range of 26 to 35.

In Canada Shaadi.com has become so popular that they have opened up their first North American center in Mississauga Ontario in March of this year (close to Toronto). The greater Toronto area is home to more than 700,000 South Asian Canadians making it ideal for a matchmaking center. Shaadi also has started to promote their new center not only online, but off as well through billboards and other physical media to better reach their target audience.

To find out more details about this dating site, check out our review of Shaadi.com.

A news website from Ontario, Canada published an article about a couple of peoples experiences on a some of the more popular dating sites. The ChristianCafe received positive praise from an online dater named Peter. He met his wife Helga, through the Christian dating service back in February of 2008. They have been happily married now for 3 months.

In early 2008 Peter lived in Ontario and Helga lived in Alberta. Peter was keeping his searches for a partner limited to the province of Ontario, though Helga was searching in neighboring provinces. Helga first contacted Peter via instant message. After a few emails and phone conversations they both realized the other person was special. In the beginning, everyday Peter would log into ChristianCafe to read Helga's messages. After about a month, Peter flew to Edmonton to meet Helga in person for the first time, at a local cafe. Things went well with Peter and Helga for the couple of days that he visited and it became a regular occurrence for Peter to fly to Edmonton. In April of 2009, Peter married Helga and they decided to stay in Edmonton.

For more on the story, read Northern Life and to find out what makes this dating site a great place for singles, read our review of ChristianCafe.com.