Their intentions are good. No doubt about that. A new law (see CNN news post) is under consideration that will force internet dating sites to notify users whether they do criminal background checks.

Despite the good intentions, supposed to make internet dating safer, this law is inherently flawed right from conception.

Indeed, new legislation may just not be the answer to internet dating safety. Remember the CANN SPAM (if I have the term right) law that was supposed to protect us from the unsolicited email? Spam messages continue to bombard us daily, unabated.

And, with all due respect to the legislators, they may not be right type people to craft such a bill. I’ll bet you my bottom dollar that pretty few of them can tell you the difference between a dating site, a social networking site, and a chat room.

Ask anyone of those legislators what MySpace.com is and the response will probably be, “a dating site”. By the way, MySpace.com is a social networking site, not a dating site, for those who may not know.

Anyway, most internet dating horror stories emanate from free dating services, chat rooms and social networking services. There is a good reason predators choose these sites: they are FREE.

You see, a paid dating site requires the use of a credit card. A credit card leaves behind a paper trail. Unless it is a stolen one, no crook in his (it’s usually a he) right mind can use a credit card knowing that it could help get him caught.

And just how do they propose dealing with fake profiles? Predators are abominable creatures, but they sure aren’t stupid (at least not all of them). They often hide behind fake names and profiles. And of course fake names cannot be background verified.

Bill Ashworth of Yahoo! commented about the proposed bill, “Unreliable checks will provide a false sense of security”. I totally agree.

Any thoughts out there?

Dating site Lavalife.com is one perhaps the top dating sites out of Canada. The following article tells the story of this dating site darned well, and I think it’s a good read:

Lavalife keeps its dating website fresh with new features

Lavalife, a Canadian tech success story that has grown to be one of the hottest online dating businesses in the world is putting 20 years of experience and research into making online dating better and safer.

What began in Toronto 20 years ago as a telephone classified service and morphed into a telephone and Internet dating service has given itself a new “skin” with more features than ever before, say Lavalife’s Lori Miller and Stephanie Barrington.

“We were the first ones in Canada to launch web personals and we grew our customer base from zero to more than a million in Canada alone,” says Miller, who is the company’s dating and singles expert. “We’re one of the first to launch the web-cam feature and now it’s morphed into video.”

Essentially, as part of your profile on Lavalife, you can now upload as many as six videos of yourself, which you can then allow suitors to view if they’re trying to get a better idea of who you are and whether or not they want to ask you out on a date.

Click here for full story
Click here to visit Lavalife

Success

Story from Lavalife Dating Site:

Hey everybody, it CAN happen. Just hang in there and be open to what comes. I would regularly receive smiles from women in other countries and usually I would ignore them. Not to be rude, just that I figured nothing could come of it. One day I received a smile from this beautiful woman in the Philippines. For some reason I read her profile. I saw she was online, so I invited her to chat. I thought she was amazing and we ended up chatting every day for seven months. I made my first trip to the Philippines to meet her… a-year-and-a-half, hundreds of dollars in phone bills and two trips to the Philippines later, we were married. I’ve recommended Lavalife to all my single friends. Orange, CA

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As Internet adult dating continues to grow in popularity among people seeking erotic adventure, or the good old one night stand, the adult sex industry is beginning to feel the heat.

Indeed, there are advantages for pursuing adult sex dating online. One big advantage is the large number of individuals, all of whom are seeking sexual gratification of one form or another.

The following article explains it better:

THE sex industry is taking a spanking from online dating websites providing “adult” contacts with minimal costs to customers, according to business analysts.

Adult dating sites such as adultmatchmaker.com.au allow people to find sexual partners without the “moral difficulties” of visiting a brothel, said analysts IBISWorld.

“Internet sites promoting sexual rendezvous between strangers with no exchange of funds have seen strong growth in recent years,” said IBISWorld general manager Jason Baker.

“These negate the need to pay for sexual gratification and sidestep many of the moral difficulties posed by soliciting prostitutes, making them a popular alternative.”

But while the industry’s traditional customers – young men – were spending more time hooking up online, Mr Baker said the number of female clients was set to grow.

Read the full article

Seeking erotic adventures? Find reputable adult sex dating sites.

Popular social networking site, MySpace.com recently announced that it had discovered and deleted profiles of 29,000 convicted sex offenders. The number of profiles deleted four times exceeds the number previously announced.

Recently, MySpace has come under attack after reports of some younger members falling prey to adult sexual predators posing as minors, as well as risqué content posted by some its members.

Though convicted sex offenders are required by law to register with their local authorities, the information is only available regional basis which makes a nationwide verification difficult.

Which begs to question as to whether proposed legislation by some state authorities to ban registered sexual predators from using social networking sites that allow minors will help much in curtailing predatory occurences: certainly hard to implement considering that online sexual predators are able to reach across states, and even countries through the World Wide Web.

Also, it would not be hard for a predator to sign up under a falls identity, which makes the proposed laws difficult to enforce. Smarter online sexual predators have been known stick to private messages, thus making it tricky to catch them.

All the same, every effort spent in making it harder for these monsters to get their next target, as well as putting them behind bars, worthwhile and deserving of praise.

Does this mean that MySpace.com is unsafe? The simple answer is no. What makes it so attractive to sexual predators is its huge membership database composed mainly of younger members. This is too enticing to the predators. Plus, that it’s free means there is really no trail back to the member.

May I add that no amount of laws, rules or regulations will substitute for parental guidance and supervision.

Paid dating services, though not entirely free of predators either, have much fewer occurrences for two main reasons 1) the membership fee keeps most of the warped elements, and 2) a credit card is required, which leaves a trail back to the card-holder.

With over half a million registered sexual offenders in the US alone, you can be pretty sure that we’ve not heard the last of them.

A lot has been written about writing online dating profiles. But most of it has been geared towards heterosexual profiles. Here’s an article on profile writing, written specially for gay men:

OUT AND ONLINE: CRACKING THE CODE TO GAY PROFILES
By NICK BURNS

July 1, 2007 — When I first discovered online dating, I felt like I had won the lottery. As a young gay man who grew up in a small conservative town, I found it hard to meet potential love interests by bumping into them at Barnes & Noble or waiting in line at the DMV. Online, there are tons of prospects-but the sheer quantity came with its own problems. How could I separate the guys I’d really like from those who weren’t my speed? Sure, there were photos and write-ups explaining who they were and what they were looking for, but I soon realized that these profiles didn’t always match the person once I met him face to face. Some guys would say they were looking for a long-term relationship when they were really out for no-strings-attached sex; others weren’t entirely out of the closet, which brought its own set of complications. These experiences made me wonder: Is there a way to check out someone’s profile and get to the truth of whether they’d be a great match? To find the answer, I consulted a dating expert for tips on reading between the lines. The advice below has helped me immensely, as I hope it’ll work for anyone else in search of the right man among many.

Read more

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More and more single parents are opting for online dating as their favorite dating method. This is understable, especially when you consider the convinience of online dating: single parents are super-busy people, often having to juggle between work, family, school, custody issues etc.

Here’s a well-writen article on the subject of single parent dating, though tilted to the single dad’s side:

Single Dads Opt for Online Dating

Single dads in the US say that online dating is their preferred method of meeting singles, according to a May 2007 survey by online dating site True of its members. With only online daters being surveyed, the results were not surprising.

Three-quarters of respondents said that online dating was the easiest way for single parents to meet others. Two-thirds said that online dating was a safer way to date.

Read the full article

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They say that when two elephants fight it is the grass that gets hurt. I’m not sure who or where is the grass in latest cat-fight (or is it elephant-fight?) between two online dating giants Eharmony and Chemistry.com. You’ve probably seen the Chemistry.com commercial, that highlights applicant rejections by competitor Eharmony.

Well, I thought this article posted at the Washington Post website puts it aptly and is an enteresting read:

They Met Online, but Definitely Didn’t Click

You think the dating scene can be cold and unforgiving? It may not be half as frosty as the tempestuous relationship between two of the biggest players in the online dating business.

A name-calling catfight, complete with accusations and counter-accusations, has broken out between eHarmony.com and an offshoot of Match.com over a subject familiar to any luckless dater:

Rejection.

In its latest ad campaign, online matchmaker Chemistry.com shows no love for eHarmony.com…

Read the full article

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Visit Chemistry.com

Here’s an interesting news article and update about Lavalife dating site:

Lavalife moves to connect older singles in prime time

Canada’s largest online dating service aims to pitch shared interests at a growing market, writes Kristin Goff.

Lavalife Corp., which offers an online dating service for single men and women, for gays and those seeking “intimate” relationships, may soon help older singles find a friend who shares an interest in flower arranging.

Canada’s largest online dating service is testing a new site, lavalifeprime.com as a place for people over age 45 to pair up for dates or friendship…

Read the full article
Visit Lavalife now
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It used to be that one would feel embarassed to tell even his/her closest confidant that he/she was even thinking of dating online. How things have changed. This article tells it extremely well, I think.

Is Online Dating A Household Word?
by Seana Mulcahy

I remember a few years ago, my mom whispered the words, “Online dating.” It was her answer to how a friend of ours met her boyfriend. Our friend was divorced with grown kids. She spent the bulk of her time working and with her family. She wasn’t in the dating scene at all. I always remember hoping she’d meet someone because she is such a great lady.

One day I was at her house for a visit. She was beaming. Without a blink of an eye, she announced to us that she was in love and we just HAD to meet this guy. She said she’d never had such a connection with anyone. When my ultra-conservative mother asked where she’d met him, our friend bellowed, “ONLINE!” My mom’s jaw dropped…

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Potential employers peeking at your personal online life? Apparently it’s happening, much more than you would like to imagine. Read on.

Be careful what you post online if you want to be able to get a job in the future. Your blog, web site, Facebook, MySpace, online dating profile, or even forum postings might “out” your salacious activities to a potential employer. According to a survey conducted by business social networking site Viadeo, one-fifth of hiring managers have used the Internet to find personal information about potential job candidates, and a quarter of those have rejected candidates based on what they found…

…But there are cases where information found online works to the candidate’s benefit. The report pointed out that 13 percent of employers had decided to actually recruit someone based on what they had found online.

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