Online dating news for this week

November 20th, 2009

A busy week in the world of online dating! Here’s a quick newsround of what’s been happening.

eHarmony UK have another Free Communication Weekend. It’s on now until Monday. You know the score - you can go through the comms process for free and communicate with your matches. Obviously better if you already have matches, which sometimes takes a while (as the site needs to match people to you).

In other news, there is now an iPhone app that lets you look up a potential online dater (or offline one, undoubtedly) and find out stuff such as whether they have a criminal record, their marital situation and their financial worth. I believe at the moment this service is only for Americans, but I’m sure it’ll spread here quickly enough. The full FT article is here while Intelius, the company that makes the app is here.

The whole thing seems a bit big brother, but if it gives people more confidence when dating online and make life more difficult for liars and rapists then I say bring it on. Of course, some things can never be discovered by trawling public records, so users of this app should beware of developing a false sense of security.

I am not so sure about finding out people’s net worth, myself, but I think services like this one are the symptom and not the cause. We do live in a society where such materialism is seen as the norm. The need to know how much money someone has was always there. The only difference is that now we seem to have more tools at our disposal that can actually give us the answer.
Financial equality between partners is an important factor of compatibility for many, but an obsessive need to find out about how much someone is worth before even going on a date with them… That’s something I don’t think should be particularly encouraged.

To finish off, another bit of analysis from OKCupid with some interesting charts and graphs but no great news for anyone who’s ever used online dating or worked in the industry. Apparently, men choose women according to their pictures (and choose the prettiest ones to message), while women also seem to message men they don’t find quite as attractive. And in other news, a large continent was discovered today in the Western hemisphere and was named “America” by the intrepid explorers. Interesting times indeed!

Related posts:

1. Online dating: How long should the first message be?
2. How to increase your online dating chances and save money

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