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It's official now! The "Who Has Viewed Me" feature is now available to members of eHarmony. You can now see members who have viewed you from up to 2 weeks ago. There is also a new option in your Match Settings which allows members to show their views of profiles as anonymous instead of showing their membership name.

This feature has the side affect of now allowing singles to see if a member is currently actively using eHarmony. If you send them a mail message and if their is no view of your profile (let alone a reply) by the eHarmony member, most likely then it is an inactive profile (unless the member is on vacation or something).

The New York Times has had several interesting articles this past month related to online dating. This past week they published an article regarding the more popular match systems called Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love. The three main systems out there are from the dating sites eHarmony, Perfectmatch.com and Chemistry. The article goes on and talks about some of the published statistics behind the matching systems, their companies advertising battles and the problems with these systems not being peer reviewed.

The unofficial eHarmony Blog got a little scoop regarding the possibility of a "Who has viewed me?" feature. SingleGuyInNC noticed the disabled option when it flashed briefly on his screen when he signed into eHarmony today.

If this is a new feature that eHarmony will be adding soon, it should help with the complaints in our user reviews regarding not been able to see which profile has had their member login recently. If some one has viewed you then you know it is an active profile. The only problem is, you still don't know if he or she is a paid member and can communicate with you. Still, I hope they add this feature in. Better yet, eHarmony should just tell us in the profile view when the member has last logged.

For more information on eHarmony, please read our review.

The Time website has an article called We Just Clicked. It talks mainly about the issues large online dating companies are going through when they expand from their own markets to other countries with different cultures. As example, one point talks about international dating sites having to rethink profile questions and what is culturally appropriate. In Japan, it was pointed out they don't really need to ask about hair color since almost all of the people have the same color.

I got a little bit of laugh out of this next point. eHarmony advertises on their site that marriages happen too their member on average 90 a day. According to "We Just Clicked", these unions have so far produced 100,000 children with a disproportionate number of them named Harmony.

Match.com was also talked about a fair bit in the article. It looks like in some countries Match.com is doing extremely well, while in others they have hardly made a dent. Match.com now is in 35 countries and of the 15 million, 1.3 million members pay for the full service and off those 30% live outside the United States. In the Scandinavian market, of the current 2.2 million online daters, 1.5 million have joined Match.com. It is unclear if Match.com counts the total number of members from all of Match.com branded dating sites from other countries in the 15 million they say are members. I always though, when Match.com US said they had 15 million members, that was the total number of members who joined the US site. The reason for my thinking this is Match.com dating sites for other countries look different and they don't allow you to use your US member account if you try to login.

In the U.S. alone, there are close to 1,000 dating sites. With competition so furious and with the growth in the North American market slowing, these sites are looking abroad for more revenue streams. For more information about eHarmony, check out our review and for Match.com please read this review.

eHarmony announced yesterday that they have a new online id verification service for its members. This service, which is provided by ReliID allows eHarmony members to validate their full name, age and address. RelyID uses publicly available information for the id verification. Once members are verified they will have a RelyID badge displayed with their profile showing other users that they have completed the process successfully.

I'm glad other large dating services have started to offer this type of verification service. It's a great first step which willl go a long way in helping people trust the information they find in a profile. This should generate a lot more communication for eHarmony members who have been verified. But, how much further can eHarmony go? True.com does criminal background checks and I have seen some other sites like MillionaireMate.com verify photos. It would be great to see all of these services combined. I wonder if this service is available on eHarmony Canada?

For more information on this new verification process read this News Release and for more information on eHarmony, check out our review.

Update 2008-01-16: I just notice that Online Dating Insider has some more information on this new verification service including the cost ($5.95) and how the actually verification takes place.

Update 2019-10-22: Please note that the Online Verification Service is not available anymore.

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.