CNN MONEY – May 20 - Thread.com is a new site that lets singles view profiles of their friends' pals on Facebook and request introductions. Facebook already has all the raw ingredients of the largest dating site in the world. More than 400M people worldwide have profiles. And since Thread relies on users' pre-existing profiles, rather than asking them to create new ones, it takes less effort to get started than most online dating outlets. Last year, Thread landed $1M in venture funding from First Round Capital and Sequoia Capital. Angel investors, including RottenTomatoes.com CEO Joe Greenstein and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also put in additional $200,000. Thread's close ties to Facebook bring a few risks. "If Facebook decides to do something, Thread must follow along, and in one fell swoop it could take their bottom line with it," says Mark Brooks, an Internet dating industry consultant. Facebook is already at the center of a firestorm over privacy issues. Thread still has to figure out how to monetize its matchmaking, whether through advertising, subscriptions or virtual gift-giving. Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, had already tried his hand at Facebook matchmaking — cutting and pasting his friends' profiles and sending awkward e-mails back and forth — when the Thread business plan hit his desk. "A lot of people were doing this manually, so I thought, 'What a wonderful idea,'" he says. Brooks, the Internet dating industry consultant, agrees: "They're bottling what we already do in the real world." FULL ARTICLE @ CNN MONEY
Category: Outlets – CNN
Women Marrying Men With Less Education, Income
CNN – May 17 - A Pew Research Center report this year noted a surge in
women between the ages of 30 and 44 making more money than their
husbands. Women made more money than men in 22% of married couples
surveyed in 2007, compared with 4% in 1970. Women represent ~ 60% of
students holding advanced degrees in areas such as medicine, law,
business and graduate programs, the U.S. Census reported in April. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Finding Love Online, Despite Health Problems
CNN – Apr 14 – While sites like Match.com and eHarmony don't discriminate, they also don't cater to people who are coping with sexually transmitted diseases, disabilities, or mental health conditions. "On bigger dating sites the competition is tremendous," says Jim Houran, PhD, a clinical psychologist and columnist for Online Dating Magazine. "And let's face it, depending on what the illness is, it could very well make you uncompetitive in the larger dating pool." Over the past five years, several sites such as Prescription4love.com, Nolongerlonely.com, Cisforcupid.com and DateAble have launched to serve the needs. The sites require members to disclose their illnesses upfront, clearing the air for what might be a deal-breaking revelation later. Prescription4Love has 8,000 members who represent nearly 40 health conditions. Ricky Durham founded Prescription4Love in 2006, inspired by his late brother Keith, who lived with Crohn's disease for 15 years before passing away in 2004. People with mental health problems, from chronic depression to schizophrenia, have also benefited from specialized sites. No Longer Lonely, a dating site that caters to the mentally ill, now has 16,000 members. The site has been responsible for more than 20 marriages. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Sex.com Auction Takes A Cold Shower
CNN MONEY – Mar 18 - Buyers lusting after one of the most lucrative domain names in the world, sex.com, will have to wait for their chance to bid on the coveted Internet property. The rights to sex.com were scheduled to be auctioned off Thursday, with bidders required to put up $1M just to get in the door, after the previous owner, Escom, went into foreclosure for unpaid debts. But the auction was postponed after Escom was forced into bankruptcy court late Wednesday by a group of creditors. Matthews said there had been "significant interest" in the domain name, but he declined to say how many bidders were scheduled to take part in the auction. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN MONEY
CNN Interview: Jim Houran
CNN – Feb 14 – With online dating you don’t just go out and meetpeople anymore; you stay at home and meet people. But do online dating
site work? Are they safe? There are things you need to know to save you
from wasting time and protecting yourself. Jim Houran from
OnlineDatingMagazine.com is a widely recognized expert in this field,
he has a PhD in clinical psychology.
Q: Do we have any idea how often these relationships that begin through websites actually work out?
Jim: No we don’t. But we know from anecdotal reports that a lot of people do use it and are successful.
Q: What do they do to make it work?
Jim: A
lot about success with online dating has to with the process. First,
you have to know what you want in a partner, be pretty specific there.
Post a recent picture of your face and show people who you are today
and not how you were 10 years ago. Be honest in your approach.
lot about success with online dating has to with the process. First,
you have to know what you want in a partner, be pretty specific there.
Post a recent picture of your face and show people who you are today
and not how you were 10 years ago. Be honest in your approach.
Q: You told me if you’re a single parent never post pictures of your kids on these sites. What is that about?
China’s Super-rich Look For Love Online
CNN – Jan 25 – Xu Tianli is the founder of Golden Bachelor, a dating site catering to an expanding class of super-wealthy Chinese singletons who have it all except for a bride. The Golden Bachelor "Diamond Love" membership goes for 300,000 Yuan ($44,000). The qualifications for joining: a personal or family wealth of at least 2M yuan ($292,000); a background that is extremely superior, wealthy and aristocratic; very good personal qualities or young, talented and beautiful. Golden Bachelor says it has 5M registered members. There also are the so-called "love hunters" event. The last one was on Dec 20 in Beijing in a luxury hotel. The ticket price was 100,000 yuan, ($14,600); 21 single women and 22 single men attended. Ladies took part in a wedding gown show and also sang, danced, even cooked for their moneyed suitors during a talent program. Eighty percent of those who came found a date, according to the company. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Spark.com Thinks BeautifulPeople.com Acted Ugly
CNN MONEY – Jan 7 - Spark.com, created by the same people behind JDate.com, BlackSingles.com and ChristianMingle.com, will offer one month free to all 5,000 members ousted from BeautifulPeople.com yesterday for allegedly putting on a few holiday pounds. To take advantage of this special offer, users have to complete a free profile and email their Spark.com username and rejection notice from the other site to getignited@spark.com.
The full article was originally published at CNN Money, but is no longer available.
Is Monogamy Realistic?
CNN – Oct 28 - In the age of hookups, friends with benefits and online dating, and as human life expectancy grows, is it reasonable to expect people to stay monogamous until death do them part? Lipton and Barash, who have been married 32 years and are the co-authors of "Strange Bedfellows" and "The Myth of Monogamy," said serial monogamy may be more realistic, a model in which people move from one committed long-term relationship to another and choose partners for different reasons at different stages of their life. More recently, polyamory, the practice of having romantic relationships with multiple people at the same time with the full knowledge and consent of all involved, has been getting a lot of attention. Researchers studying polyamory estimate there are more than half a million polyamorous families in the U.S. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
OMG — My Mom Is Online Dating
CNN — Sep 2 – As the baby boom generation ages and once-married boomers become single again, they increasingly are turning to the Web in search of dates. The number of eHarmony users age 45+ and divorced has more than doubled in the past eight years, says Gian Gonzaga, senior researcher for eHarmony. Registered users ages 45-64 jumped 9% from 2007-2008. For many grown children, having a parent suddenly jump into the dating pool is a shock, especially if the parent begins dating numerous people, and perhaps having sex with new partners. PerfectMatch.com CEO Duane Dahl, age 46, helped his own mother, who is in her late 60s, enroll in his service. "This is a great opportunity for us to help our parents and educate them", says Dahl. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Virtual Currencies Power Social Networks
CNN — May 19 — Currencies that exist only online are becoming a more significant part of commerce on the Web and in the real world. Some, like the hi5 Coin, operate almost like tokens in an arcade or tickets at a fair: They're a stand-in for real-world currency. Other "virtual currencies," like Second Life's Linden Dollars, however, are traded on markets. The currencies also fuel online gaming communities and are becoming an important part of social networks. Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, says people transfer at least $1 billion into the virtual currencies each year, with most of that money going into online games. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.