The clock is ticking on JDate. No, I am not talking about the biological clock of millions of single women who are positive that their lives will be over if they can't find Mister Right before they turn 30. JDate's problems are of the business variety.

Spark Networks Inc. (AMEX: LOV), the parent of JDate and countless other singles sites, is a vestige of the early days of the Internet. Heck, I bet half of the computers sold during the late 1990s were to single people looking for their cyber soul mate. That's why I got online, and sure enough after gazillions of bad dates I met my wife. Even then, JDate was an expensive service. I met my wife on AOL's personal site which was free at the time. The competition for the online dater has gotten even more intense since then which is why I found the report in the New York Times that Spark Networks was looking for a buyer not surprising.

Online dating services are a dime a dozen. They are fairly cheap to set up and maintain. Moreover, social networks including News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace, reportedly one of Spark's suitors, and Facebook offer fairly easy ways to meet members of the opposite (or same sex) as does craigslist. Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) may be interested in Spark to help its Chemistry.com service compete more effectively against eHarmony.

While I am sure that these companies would eagerly snap up Spark at the right price, investors may be ones who wind up with the broken hearts.

I read somewhere today that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Personals is the number one dating service on the Internet. They say it's lonely at the top, but apparently singles using the site have been successful in quelling their loneliness -- just when I was certain that that internet dating stuff was bogus ...

Rivaled by Match.com, the Hoo's in Yahooville are working industriously to stay one step ahead of the game. They've recently added a new feature called "Quick View", which allows the user to scan for potential mates more quickly and efficiently. They are afforded the ability to mark off characteristics, (i.e., smoker, non-smoker) as "breaker" or "maker", this way any received profiles with 'breaker" traits will be labeled as such. And it's likely that the "breaker" will be discarded by the user - "Layta!". Sounds like a good deal, right? Quick, convenient, and it saves precious time. I don't think so. (Note: if you don't have the time to really get to know and evaluate a person, how will you have time for a relationship?)

First of all the whole idea of a first impression being based on a profile (a Quick View) -- mere words and check offs -- is whack. You can hardly trust people in person, let alone on paper.