I'm trying out Match.com's new dating service, Chemistry.com. They're test marketing it in Denver and a couple of other cities and the differences are illuminating. If you grant the assumption that the Chemistry site is probably the result of Match's customer feedback, including surveys and focus groups, you can draw some interesting conclusions.

Chemistry's site has more in-depth personality evaluations, similar to eHarmony.com and other sites. Presumably, this is at least partly a competitive response to the other companies' claims of more "scientific" matching. The evaluations may be more than just that, though. The claims of "better love through science" are hard to swallow whole, but it's also hard to dismiss the claims entirely. Like eHarmony, Chemistry uses sliders to ask the client to show their attitudes toward ambition, money, tidiness and other relationship matters. After the survey, they class the user by some set of personality classes that seems vaguely familiar to me. I've noticed that my own profile and that of the women I've checked on the site are all classed with attributes from four categories. Each category seems to have a baseline value of 25%, and every user I've looked at has values in the 23-27% range. How they distinguish personalities from this is beyond me.

For me, the real fascination on Chemistry is that they now have carefully structured paths for matching. They only let you view five profiles daily and you are asked to rate your attraction via a slider and then decide whether to make the match "active" or archive it so you can never see her profile again in your matches. Once you express interest, they transmit the interest to the match and she has to also express interest. They then push you through a set of sliders for a few relationship issues and once both people complete that, they push each user through brief essay questions before permitting email contact. At any point in the process, either user can archive the other, ending the whole thing. Apparently, they even offer to set up face-to-face meetings if the emails go well.

What I find interesting about Chemistry's "guided communication" approach is that it seems to me that they must be responding to customer complaints. I imagine that they found people do more browsing than contacting, leaving users unwilling to pay for the contact part. This "push" process looks like a response to that.

CDs listened to today:

• Liz Phair: Exile in Guyville
• Wolfgang Rihm: Jagden und Formen
• Ned Rorem: An Oboe Book
• Royal Crescent Mob: Spin the World
• Aimee Mann: Bachelor No. 2
• The Kills: No Wow
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Preludes & Fugues, disk 2