eHarmony Blog.com

The 9th annual Internet Dating Conference taking place in Miami will once again be the largest gathering of industry online dating, matchmaking and social media executives ever. The 2010 Miami event had over 500 executives in attendance. Other previous events in Miami (2004 to 2009) had over 300 executives in attendance.
Is eHarmony Inc. sending delegates/attendees to that conference?

I hope this time, the executives attending iDate 2012 can talk about THE INNOVATIONS the Online Dating Industry needs!

I remember I had been reading/analyzing iDate conferences since 2004 and unfortunately the main speaker, every year, year over year, had been regurgitating the same statistics, talking the same rubbish because attendees come to Miami to discuss stupidities, as usual in every iDate conference, and not the big Agenda.
There is no Legislation, no ID verification, low reliable background checks, no Quality Norms, except for Shaadi. No online dating site is Scientifically Proven.
The Online Dating Industry needs to kill the Matchmaking Industry. There is no room for both, like computers killed typewriters, but now C-Level executives are more worried about their golf scores than their company’s long term strategy and innovations.
Traffic of paid dating sites declined sharply during 2011 and continues.
Online Dating for serious daters is performing as a Big Online Casino, with low successful rates.
Worldwide there are less than 7 million paid members (adding up all the ones at eHarmony, eDarling, Match, Chemistry, Meetic, MeeticAffinity, OkCupid, PeopleMedia’s Communities, PlentyOfFish, Parship, eCift, etc). The market remains enormous for new players.
Online Dating for serious daters does not need to be more social, it needs to be more effective, more efficient.
The biggest scammers in the Online Dating Industry are not from Ghana or Nigeria because they are precisely marketing executives from big sites. They use credit card billing trickery, automatic rebilling.
eHarmony Brazil failed because NO ONE uses credit cards in South America, they pay in cash or using debit cards in one-time transaction. eHarmony Japan never launched.

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From eHarmony’s matching algorithm, the truth. part 2

In compatibility matching methods there are 2 steps:
1) to objectively measure personality traits or other human variables (with the 16PF5 test) without distortion.
2) to calculate compatibility between prospective mates

IPSATIVE personality tests are OBSOLETE (self-descriptive questionnaires) and should be discarded: MBTI (PerfectMatch), DISC (ThomasKnowsPeople), Enneagram (Dopasowani) or other proprietary ipsative tests like the ones used at Chemistry, ButterfliesAgain, Doskonalapara, PembePanjur, LittleHint, oneGoodLove and others.
NORMATIVE personality tests like Big5 versions used at PlentyOfFish, eHarmony / eDarling, Meetic Affinity, Parship, Be2, True, etc. are good for orientative purposes but not good enough for predictive purposes.

“Because the Big Five groups the more specific primary-level factors, feedback organized around the five Global Factor scales is more easily understood. For detailed feedback or predictive purposes, one should assess the more specific primary factors. Research has shown that more specific factors like the primary scales of the 16PF Questionnaire predict actual behavior better than the Big 5 Global Factors. For example, one extravert (a bold, fearless, high-energy type) may differ considerably from another (a sweet, warm, sensitive type), depending on the extraversion-related primary scale score patterns, so deeper analysis is typically warranted.” Extracted from the 16PF5 Manual

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From eHarmony’s matching algorithm, the truth. part 1
and
The 5 steps in eHarmony Japan’s questionnaire.

you had seen eHarmony’s Compatibility Matching Algorithm consists of 2 stages.
* A mutual filtering stage, which is  common to any online dating site like PlentyOfFish, Match, Chemistry, True, PerfectMatch, Parship, MeeticAffinity, OkCupid, Be2, FriendScout24, etc.
* The core stage.

Unfortunately eHarmony was designed during year 2000, more than 11 years ago. The 3 milestone discoveries of the 2001 – 2010 decade about Theories of Romantic Relationships Development with commitment revealed:
I) Several studies showing contraceptive pills users make different mate choices, on average, compared to non-users. “Only short-term but not long-term partner preferences tend to vary with the menstrual cycle”
II) People often report partner preferences that are not compatible with their choices in real life.  [uncovered by Eastwick & Finkel (2008); Kurzban & Weeden (2007); Todd, Penke, Fasolo, & Lenton (2007)] (FORGET Behavioural recommender systems or other system that learns your preferences)
III) The strict personality similarity axis. What is important in attracting people to one another may not be important in making couples happy. Compatibility is all about a high level on personality* similarity* between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.
*personality measured with a normative test (the majority of the sites are using the Big5 inventory, no one uses the 16PF5 test or equivalent, yet).
*similarity: there are different ways to calculate similarity, it depends on how mathematically is defined.

Also Personality Based Recommender Systems are the next generation of recommender systems because they perform FAR better than Behavioural ones (past actions and pattern of personal preferences)
That is the only way to improve recommender systems, to include the personality traits
of their users and they need to calculate personality similarity between them.

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… using the NORMATIVE 16PF5