Okay, the first of an occasional series of social media/personals/online dating notes, these from round the web:

• Breakup world: January's the trash dump for relationships couples abandon once they've survive the holidays.
• Merc: So Doctor Phil's gonna give dating advice right on Match.com for $12.99 a month; I'd like to see him face off with AOL's Star Jones, whose advice is both cheap and free (ouch).
• BizWeek: harmony's got a new CEO--So does CE) equal IPO--or M&A (the new CEO worked at Overture, now Yahoo Search Marketingg--so the writer seems to think so.)
• Match.com's Chemistry.com is now live, but Corante's David Evans is not impressed.

What's striking about the online personals category, imho, is how "me to" it is--and how distinct it seems from the myspace and facebooks of the world. After all, prospective dates are listings, aka transactions, a currency traded like apartments listings or help wanted, and yet the data contained in most matches is so poor--social networks go one better in some ways, but dating's not a direct focus of most social networks, not directly--not like in the the very focused personals.

Hmmn....interesting.