Looking through plenty of fish I was able to do searches on wine. The plenty of fish community at this point is perhaps a little more raunchy than say Match.com, but our experience is that pay services communities tend to be too cautious and conservative so its a wash there.
So is there any reason for a wine lovers dating service? Well granted the wine lovers service has a lot more information about wine on it, with lots of articles, and lots of money on advertising and it looks nice. Perhaps its a bit over designed, you might just want to search wine on a dating site?
It comes down to corporate efforts to keep the subscriptions coming in to these services. A site like plenty of fish makes its creator a million of so dollars a year through google ads, which would be nothing compared to the massive companies that are merging around dating services which collect maybe $300 a year from member just in usage fees, and then ads, and then the ability to sell the information to marketing firms.
Of course everything on Plenty of Fish is right there for Google and Yahoo to collect. People who don't marry live shorter lives than people who do, would you want your insurance company collecting a record of your online dating over say 20 years when making a life insurance policy? Of course they can aske are you married already, but I suspect patterns of dating posts will establish a great deal more about someone that could be used to predict life span and sickness history.
But lets put the issue of data security aside.
Essentially if everyone was on something like plenty of fish, if people used tags and tag searching, and took precautions they should take with any dating site there would probably be no need for specialized sites or even pay sites. As of today I see nothing that the pay sites offer to make them worth their money AND since they are directing to the more cautious market segment with more money they tend to be full of old people who couldn't make it work in the real world for 20 years. (No offense I hope)
Chemistry.com claims to have some anthropological information to help more advance pair discovery but we can't see it yet. You have to answer a lot of questions.
The thing about plenty of fish is that it just feels low class, real low class. I am looking for open source free online dating sites that have skinned themselves a bit better and allow users to make ad on functions. Also more FILTERS. There is a need for community policing and removing of cons.
I think massive sites with tags and community areas that allow people to browse and discover are better than forms based matching sites. I am also becoming more and more suspect about how motivated professional sites are to actually developing working relationships.
But right now to be honest plenty of fish looks awful, is full on non-pictures, most of the pictures are clearly not of the people or not from this century, and the tool is not very personal. By that I mean it does not keep state information about you. For example if you search on the UK it should probably keep a state variable that you are looking to date in the UK unless told otherwise. But when you click a tag on a person it takes you to the tag poll for the entire global community. Real useful. Search is suppose to allow fine tuning, but this keeps taking you back to the top.
It also is always sending you to the US by default, the entire US. Maybe in 50 people will be dating globally but it is not happening right now.
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