You know the avuncular face of Neil Warren, the eHarmony founder who played online cupid to millions. While dating sites like match.com and hundreds of others surged and paired people pretty much willy-nilly, Warren promised to do the legwork like matchmakers of old. First of all, there is the famous questionnaire — a nearly 150-question personality test that provides ample data to let the eHarmony algorithms perform their love magic. Warren appeared on TV and internet commercials as eHarmony positioned itself as a smarter, more businesslike way of finding a mate — like LinkedIn where the other sites were more like Facebook.
[eHarmony founder Neil Warren wrote: Falling in Love for All the Right Reasons: How to Find Your Soul Mate]
But guess what? Facebook got way bigger than LinkedIn. And so with the 82-year-old Warren giving the CEO seat to Grant Langston earlier this year, eHarmony is downgrading the famous questionnaire — and making it easier for people to sign up. A hopeful romance seeker can can still fill it out, but the questionnaire will no longer be required. While that won’t immediately turn eHarmony into a swipefest like Tinder, it profoundly alters the DNA of the dating innovator.
