Last week after signing up to try out Chemistry.com during the public testing phase I had a thought. It was an idea for an article. Something to post here that I thought was interesting and would make a good story. Yet I couldn’t come up with a good way to execute it. What is it that I am talking about?

Well I thought that it would be fascinating to be matched with someone at one personality matching dating site and then each sign up at others. Allowing you to see if multiple matchmaking sites would find you compatible. I thought this would be a great idea. If you were matched at PerfectMatch then would Chemistry.com match you, for example?

There is no good way to do this though that I could think of. You can’t just have you and someone you know sign up because you don’t know if you match. Once you have been matched with someone on one site it is kind of weird to ask them to sign up for another dating site to see if you would get matched up there as well. You can’t go back to past matches as once you stop communicating it is understood that you will not contact them anymore. Any idea I did have, to try and do this, well they all seemed too creepy. My first purpose is to meet someone not to test out dating sites after all. So I put it on the old back burner. Sometimes when you stop thinking about something you come up with a new idea out of the blue.

In this case I didn’t have to wait that long. Yet I never came up with an idea. I just logged in to Chemistry.com last night and saw that I had five new matches. One of the names stood out, as it was not a Jessica, a Jennifer, a Michelle or a Sarah. I clicked on it to read the profile. When the page loaded there it was, a picture that I recognized. From where, you ask? From eHarmony, this was a person I had previously been matched up with there.

These two sites have different matching criteria but yet have both matched me with the same person. I went back and checked the closed matches at eHarmony to make sure. It is the same person. I find this intriguing and will keep an eye out for more of these double matches should they occur. Maybe your ultimate match is one that multiple matching sites find you compatible with. What do you think about that? Maybe one day you could sign up at PerfectChemistryTrueHarmony.com to find that really special someone.

When you have finished answering all the questions at eHarmony you are then presented a personality profile. This gives you some information about yourself. You can then share this information with matches at your discretion. They tell you that they base their matches off of Dr. Neil Clark Warren’s 29 dimensions of compatibility but you don’t really get to see how you match in each of the dimensions.

Here you get something similar, your Chemistry Profile. On this they show you your Major and Minor personality types as well as a breakdown of each of the four types, which are:

• Explorer – Measures qualities like high energy and creativity as well as spontaneity. These types tend to seek risk and pleasure and are maybe intellectually curious and hard to sway their opinion.
• Builder – These types tend to be very popular and are very attached to their home and family. They possess qualities like a calm outlook and very little anxiety and they tend to be consistent, loyal and protective.
• Negotiator – Tend to be good at seeing the big picture, are long-term planners, and like to build consensus. They tend to be intuitive thinkers that are flexible, verbal and skilled socially. Other qualities are imagination, empathy and nurturing.
• Director – People in this category tend to be daring and original. They like to direct and invent and are non-conformist. They are very good at thinking in the abstract and planning in the short term. They also are very assertive and competitive as well as mentality strong and efficient.

They say:

Characteristics of all four personality types can be found within each of us, but there is almost always one personality type that is dominant. We call this the major personality type.

The Chemistry Profile also identifies your minor or secondary personality type. You exhibit some aspects of this personality type, though not to the same degree as with your major type.

They give you a percentage to represent to what degree these types make up your personality.

Also on this page is your breakdown of universal personality traits and where you show up on the scale of each and which of the four types above match well with you for each of the following:

• Extravert – These are sociable, conversational and friendly people who often like to take on a leadership role and tend to be very comfortable around others and don’t mind large groups at all.
• Agreeable – These people are usually easygoing, tolerant and accommodate others. They tend to be interested in building harmony and consensus.
• Conscientious – People in this category are very determined to meet or exceed expectations. They also tend to be very disciplined and focused on the task at hand and not distracted easily.
• Open to New Experiences – These tend to be people interested in trying things a new way. They are innovative and like to experiment. They are have new experiences and are usually very creative and original thinkers.
• Emotional Stability – People here tend to be strong and steady and do not get upset easily. They usually have a level head when dealing with problems or unexpected changes. They would be described as being calm and collected.

The new thing is that at Chemistry.com you don’t only get this breakdown for you, you get a glimpse into how you match with a match. You get a few broad paragraphs about your personality and also about your match’s personality. You also get to see where each of your fall on the scale for each of the five universal traits. Your match’s get to see the same thing.

Once again it is the same only different. The more time I spend on Chemistry.com the more I feel that they have taken what eHarmony is doing and kicked it up a notch. The ability to see How You Match is quite interesting. Whether the matching criteria actually works to produce compatible and long lasting relationships is another matter altogether.

Chemistry.com has a different matching criterion than eHarmony as does PerfectMatch have yet another way of measuring compatibility. Just choose which type of personality matching is best for you or which one you think will give you the best chance of finding that special someone. What do you think of the whole online dating via personality matching explosion?

If you have ever used eHarmony then you will find this site to be quite familiar. You are given a page of new matches from where you choose to show interest in or not. At eHarmony you decide to start communication or not.

The eHarmony communication process has one more step, that being the first step of what is termed closed ended questions, which are basically multiple-choice icebreakers. The next step at eHarmony is the first step here. That is the exchange of Must Haves/Can’t Stands, which here are termed Relationship Essentials.

The difference is that here you choose 5 things you like and 5 things you don’t from a list and then give each a value of how much you like or don’t like them by moving a slider between not important and important. This allows you to assign a visual value to just how important you feel these are to a relationship. For example: I chose the statement about humor being important and put the slider almost all the way to the right showing that I find humor to be really essential.

Another difference between here and eHarmony is when you show interest in a potential partner here the system asks you to move a slider between no interest and high interest. This is not for the other person to see. It is so the system can learn about you and who you might be looking for. They say:

Our system is designed to continually learn from your feedback: who you like and who you don’t like.

Your input is automatically integrated into our matching system so that over time we get a more complete picture of who you are and the kind of person you’re looking for.

This is an interesting feature if it actually does as it says. Also it makes you think that the longer you continue to use the site the better your chance will be of finding someone you really like as the system gets smarter. From an income point of view this may be one of their better ideas as the longer you stay the more you will pay.

You might want to give Chemistry.com a try if you are in Seattle, San Diego, Denver or Washington D.C. as they are presently beta testing the system and it is only open to singles in these areas.

Last week I read about a new online dating matching service called Chemistry.com. It is a new online dating service from the people behind Match.com. My first impressions after reading about this new online dating site was that it sure sounds a lot like eHarmony.

The site is in beta, meaning it is still being tested, and is only available presently to people in Seattle, San Diego, Denver and Washington D.C. They are allowing online daters in these areas to sign up for a free 90 day usage of the site which allows them to test the service and get feedback from real users before going live and being available to everyone.

So since I live in the Seattle area, I decided to sign up and see what the new site was like. You start out just like many of the personality matching services like eHarmony and PerfectMatch by answering a bunch of questions. These include answering questions about pictures like is this a real or fake smile on this person? You also answer questions about words or topics by choosing how important they are to you. The questionnaire is shorter in number of questions than eHarmony and took me about 25 minutes to complete.

Once signed up and logged into the site my first impressions were correct. This is a lot like eHarmony. The communication process looks very similar, more on this once I get a few matches and am able to see exactly how the process works. It really does look like they spent a lot of time at eHarmony and then gave the progression a few tweaks.

The matching criterion is completely different than the others matching dating sites out there. This is what will be used to differentiate them, along with what seems to be a focus on getting people to actually meet in person, from the other matching services.

So far I have to say that Chemistry.com looks the same only different.