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A single male in North Carolina who has a pretty good idea of what he wants in a relationship partner but can’t seem to find it on eHarmony or just about anywhere else he looks…

Gentlemen: Beware of the serial expensive dinner dater…

A series of commentaries on this article on Business Insider about a woman who used a series of dates on Match.com to support her expensive lifestyle.

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Review of eHarmony on the iPad

As seen on The Unofficial Apple Weblog

“Unfortunately for eHarmony, my lack of appeal outlasted their service, and despite chatting with a few nice women, none of them wanted to meet me over dinner or drinks. But I can’t fault the iPad app itself.”

More evidence that they should have spent their developer dollars on a better matching algorithm instead of a fancy app, no?

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  • ArdenghiFernando wrote

    You are right. NEW CEO, NEW site to be launched before February 2012, NEW matching algorithm. Do not renew your eHarmony\'s subscriptions yet! Mr. Verba, the new eHarmony\'s CEO had ordered eHarmony\'s Team (Carter, Gonzaga, Lee) to stop playing the guitar at eHarmony\'s Labs and began working i …

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The ineffectiveness of speed dating and why you should not pay for a dating service

Summary
The general conclusion I have arrived at after actively seeking a serious partner for 5+ years, is that paying to meet someone, either via online dating or in real life, is a poor choice.

When someone tells you to compare what their dating service costs per day to a cup of coffee, the answer is to tell them to keep their service, go buy yourself a cup of coffee in a busy coffee shop, sit in the shop and converse with people there. At least, when all is said and done, you are guaranteed to get a cup of coffee and the odds are no better than you get with any sort of dating service.

The whole story
To supplement my rather limited dating repertoire having limited myself to free dating sites (which more or less boils down to OkCupid!) I decided to give speed dating a try. I naively thought that it might be a better than online dating since there is no facade of profiles.

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Do any of these sound like one of your introductory messages?

There is nothing new here but CNN offers up some examples of what not to write in that first message, in case you can’t quite figure out why no one is responding to you…

Hopefully, the readers of this website are smarter than the average online dater and never write messages like those…

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  • Fernando Ardenghi wrote

    "the usage of words of particular categories in a message may signal various personality traits and (researchers) formulate hypotheses on the effects on a target's decision to respond to a message or not. .... Both females and males are less likely to respond to an initial message if the sender us …

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OkCupid begins beta testing “locals” GPS matching service

[edited to add link to the service on their website]

“Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.”
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If OkCupid has its way, two single people will no longer “pass in the night”…

OkCupid recently pushed to users of their iOS and Android application a “locals” service they are beta testing.

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Online dating: “a prototypically perfect lab full of bad equilibrium”

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about the mistakes people make while dating (not limited to just online dating, as these traps are the same ones people make when meeting in other ways).

What I find interesting about this article, having been on the online dating circuit for several years, is that the problem they illustrate is exactly what eHarmony was supposed to fix!

When I first started with eHarmony, I was idealistic and focused and followed this philosophy. Of course, I had no success, because it is the expectation to go pick the easy questions and to find comfortable conversations. That was the community standard and not following it got you the good old “Match Closed”.

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  • Fernando Ardenghi wrote

    Dr. Dan Ariely had been researching mainly in Online Dating Sites 1.0: "Browsing/Searching Options, Powerful Searching Engines" (Yahoo!Personals during 2006 - 2007) Dr. Dan Ariely did not study in depth any actual on line dating site offering personality/compatibility matching methods like eHarm …

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