MASHABLE – July 12 - OKCupid has added a handful of location-based features.
1. Broadcasts – This allows you to let your best matches know that you’re free now and suggest activities.
2. Locals – This shows you matches nearby.
3. Notifications – OKCupid will let you know when a good match is nearby.
Month: July 2011
eHarmony Sells Wedding and Parenting Sites
EHARMONY ADVICE – July 10 – eHarmony has sold its wedding and parenting websites, ProjectWedding.com, Weddingbee.com, and JustMommies.com. The sale allows the company to concentrate its efforts on growing its core relationship services, eHarmony, Jazzed and Compatible Partners domestically and internationally. Project Wedding, a free wedding planning resource, was acquired by WeddingWire, a leading wedding technology company. Since March 2010, WeddingWire has powered Project Wedding’s local vendor directories and vendor reviews. Weddingbee and Just Mommies, a top wedding blog and parenting community, were acquired by Internet Brands, which maintains a portfolio of more than 100 websites.
by Becky Teraoka
The full article was originally published at eHarmony Advice, but is no longer available.
iDate Beverly Hills Conference Photos Now Live
OPW – July 12 – Check out the photos from the Internet Dating Conference Beverly Hills. The SLS Hotel was a superb venue and this was one of the best run, most interesting iDate's yet. Well done to all the speakers and to Marc and the iDate team. The Courtland Brooks team are looking forward to Moscow in September and Miami in January.
Curious US Dating Forums Boom on the Internet
MCCLATCHY TRIBUNE – July 10 – The internet dating market in the United States is booming: more and more websites are targetting particular social groups, and such specialization brings with it many curiosities. Geek2Geek.com is one of the countless US dating websites aimed at a niche. There is also Ivydate.com, named after the academically elitist Ivy League. At Horseloversconnection.com owning a horse is no must, although profile photos often show one. JDate.com, aimed mainly at the Jewish community, is one of the oldest niche-targetting sites. As of last year, there were "more than 1,500 dating sites" in the country, according to Mark Brooks, an advisor to several such sites. "Many of the new sites are niche dating sites," Brooks says.
See all posts on JDate
See all posts on Geek2Geek
See all posts on IvyDate
Online Dating Leaves Middle-aged Women in ‘Single Wilderness’
THE OBSERVER – July 10 - A survey found 8 out of 10 women over 50 think they have become invisible to men. The average age at which we divorce is rising – 41 now for women and 43 for men – and the number of single parents is projected to rise to 1.9M over the next decade. Love for the single woman in her mid-40s and beyond has its own particular complications and sorrows. On dating sites men have the pick up and down the age range. Katie Sheppard, the director of relationships at Match.com, said online dating was now the second most common way couples met across the UK – behind being introduced by friends or family. Women also report losing friends because of the differences between single and attached lives. There are rewards, however, for remaining single, says Kate Grussing, the founder of the management consultancy firm Sapphire Partners, who believes single, childless women in their 40s and 50s have huge advantages at work.
Meet People Less Awkwardly with Grouper
HUFFINGTON POST – July 9 – Grouper is a social service that gets you offline, and out meeting real people. Grouper, which is currently only available in New York City, matches groups of three girls with three boys, by looking at interests, ages and more. The service matches online information from your Facebook profile with a human matchmaker looking to get you talking to strangers. To get Groupered, users can go to the site and connect with Facebook to apply. Once they are connected, they answer three questions, with the same 140-character restriction on responses as Twitter. The user who signed up brings two friends to the meetup. Grouper charges $20 per person and picks the location of the meeting place, as well as providing the first round of drinks for free. Users pay online beforehand and list the times they'd be available to meet.
Boost Facebook App Adoption Using Personal Messages
RAGAN – July 7 - Facebook users are more likely to use a brand's Facebook app if they find out about it through private messages and newsfeed posts, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found. Viral strategies are 10 times more likely to bring in new users than banner ads and twice as effective as emails. MIT professors Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker offered an entertainment app to random samples of users. Some users got a version of the app that used "passive" messaging—that is, the app posted messages to users' Facebook walls every time they used it. The passive version led to 246% higher user adoption compared with a version that sent no automatic messages, but were 7% less active with the product.
by Matt Wilson
See full article at Ragan
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
eHarmony Founder Says ‘Don’t Get Married’
BLISS TREE – July 6 – Dr. Neil Clark Warren thinks that most of us are just choosing the wrong partner. “~2M couples will get married in the US this year alone. Several hundred thousand of these couples should reconsider, postpone their weddings or not get married,” he says. Too many marriages end badly. "Bad marriages don’t just happen to bad people. They mostly happen to good people who are not good for each other", he says.
Rising Star Buy: Jiayuan.com
THE MOTLEY FOOL – July 5 – Jiayuan, China's largest online dating platform, has been on a watchlist ever since it went public early last month. The company currently captures 44% of all online dating spending in China. The business model is focused on microtransactions – charging for messaging or "poking" other profiles – rather than on subscriptions. With ~900K active paying accounts right now, Jiayuan still has room to go in a country with 242M individuals between the ages of 20 and 34.