Features

Late last month eHarmony announced a new feature for their dating service. Members can now tell when their matches were last on the site by checking out the "Active Within" enhancement that is visible (or will be soon) next to the matches name. The activity is broken down into 5 increments with "Today" being the shortest and "Over three weeks ago" being the longest.

This feature has been requested for a long time as it helps members to prioritize which of their matches they should contact first. You have a better chance of contacting someone who was just on the site as opposed to over 3 weeks ago.

For more on this story you can read the eHarmony blog and to find out more about this dating site, please read our review of eHarmony.

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.

To streamline the profile creation process for mobile users eHarmony announced last month that they put together a questionnaire for their profile that can be completed in about 10 minutes. eHarmony's normal relationship questionnaire can take about an hour or so to complete.

The mobile questionnaire has 100 questions that eHarmony has tested and experimented with to ensure that mobile users who fill out this shorter version will still receive very high quality matches. They have also updated the interface to use the touch screen much more effectively with less key strokes or touches. Users question will now auto save as well so they can come back at any point and finish up the questions if something comes up.

The look and feel of the dating app also has changed to make it more personal. The test is now constructed like a book with chapters. To help people answer questions more accurately some of the profile questions also have been re-phrased into first person statements.

To try out this new version (1.4.1) of eHarmony's dating app you can visit iTunes.

For more information you can visit the official eHarmony blog and for more details on the dating service you can read our review of eHarmony.

I have been reviewing Match.com again recently and found a few mail message features that I had missed. It looks like both of these features where added in the first half of 2010 (at least that was when the information was added to help).

VIP Email

A Very Interested Person or VIP Email message can be sent by a subscriber to indicate that they are particularly interested in the person who is receiving the message. What makes this email different is that a Match.com member can send only one a week. With a VIP Email, Email Read Notification is included for free (there usually is an upgrade charge for this). The message will also be bolded and highlighted green in the receivers email box so it is easier to identify. Plus, your profile will be highlighted on the receivers Match.com's Connections page for 30 days.

Here is a small bit of news regarding Zoosk.

According to the WSJ, Zoosk.com plans later this year to start matching singles based on their tastes in music, movies and books. This update to the matching system is in response to a survey Zoosk did of its members that found 57 percent of people found it a turn-on if someone else liked the same books as they did. Zoosk also confirmed that common shared interests like those of movies, music and books are great topics for initiating a conversation.

To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our review of Zoosk.com.

With the recent downtime of PlentyofFish a number of members contacted me asking a few questions about the dating site. One of them was:

... can you tell me what happened to the POF Forums/Message Board?

To my surprise, it looked like at first glance that the forums have been removed from Plentyoffish.com. The forums were quite popular on the site with hundreds of posts being added every day. Looking deeper into the problem the person who asked me this question said he found that the forums still existed but the link to them had been removed from PlentyofFish a while ago. He then asked me why? My best educated guess is that the forums were too distracting to members. The owner of POF wanted people to use his dating site where ads are being displayed. The more ads viewed and clicked on by visitors the more money the website will make (this is how most websites and publications make money, including the one you are reading now). Since the forums don't display ads (and therefore do not make money) I figure that is why the link to them was removed. With no link, new members wouldn't find out about the forums and stay just on the dating site while still allowing the older members who knew about the forums to continue to use them.

For those of you looking for the PlentyofFish forums, you can still find them here or, if you like you could try posting in our own dating site advice forums.

While I was checking out the PlentyofFish forum issue I notice that there were a few new features. First off it looks like Upgraded Members (those of you who paid for the Serious Members Badge) now have their profiles displayed to local users at the top of their search results. Originally the upgraded membership was suppose to show your intent to the dating community that you are serious about dating (see Story), that is why it was called the Serious Member Profile Upgrade. As we thought though, this badge has slowly but surely morphed into a full membership upgrade that now even affects the search results. I am not saying this is a bad thing as we knew it would eventually happen, it was just funny how POF didn't originally want people to think they had a paid membership.

A few other new features I noticed included some search options. You can now search for users in a specified zip code who logged in at least once a day. The average user displayed by this search actually logs in 3 times a day to PlentyofFish. The other new search option is a "Will Respond" search. This is supposed to return users who will most likely respond to a message from you if you view their profile. The average user from this search last logged in about 20 hours ago and they are expected to be online again in the next 3 hours. Both of these search options are a great idea!

The last new item I found is a statistic. According to PlentyofFish, every day 1.4 million people use their dating site. In 2009, this number was 900 thousand.

For more details on this popular online dating site, please read our review of PlentyofFish.