Catalyst Group, a New York usability-research firm, reviewed the two popular dating sites with an eye toward how they walk customers through profiles, finding matches and making contact.

The study considered feedback from eight users of each site (four men and four women) who had been a date with someone they contacted through it in the past month.

Among the findings: eHarmony, which markets itself to people seeking serious relationships, “was preferred by people who would prefer a high degree of handholding,” but experienced users find the profiles “formulaic.” Some also bristle at how they see potential matches — as chosen by eHarmony, not by a search of their choosing.

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PlentyofFish has long been a free site, which has made it hugely popular. It claims on its Web site that members will go on 18 million dates with each other this year.

In a February report, Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay called it “the most successful of a new generation of ‘free’ or advertising-supported dating sites,” and one whose growth could pose a “Craigslist-like disintermediation” threat to established players like Yahoo Personals (YHOO) and IAC’s (IACI) Match.com.

By wading into the paid arena, it may lessen that disintermediation risk, but compete on more even terms with those sites.

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But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s an interview I did with Barry Diller, the always clever chairman and CEO of IAC, the Internet conglomerate whose holdings include Ask.com, Match.com and many others.

The video of the interview is in three parts, all of which I posted this week.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media (LINTA) over the last year, Diller finally broke apart IAC (IACI) just six weeks ago. His reason: The company had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

In this third part, Diller talks about the new digital communications age and the explosion of video and then takes questions from the audience about tenacity versus stupidity in business, time management and where he is going to make “trouble” next.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s an interview I did with Barry Diller, the always clever chairman and CEO of IAC, the Internet conglomerate whose holdings include Ask.com, Match.com and many others.

The video of the interview is in three parts, all of which I will post this week.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media (LINTA) over the last year, Diller finally broke apart IAC (IACI) just six weeks ago. His reason: The company had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

In this second part, Diller talks about the dire digital crossroads in Hollywood, the prospects for the Ask.com search service, his take on the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover battle (no one is a winner here), Google’s dominance, Facebook’s hype (Diller calls the hot social-networking site the “princess phone” of this era) and the power of interactivity.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s an interview I did with Barry Diller, the always clever chairman and CEO of IAC, the Internet conglomerate whose holdings include Ask.com, Match.com and many others.

The video of the interview is in three parts, all of which I will post this week.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media (LINTA) over the last year, Diller finally broke apart IAC (IACI) just six weeks ago. His reason: The company had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

In this first part, Diller talks about the details of his court fight with Malone, why he wanted to break up IAC and what it is going to become all carved up, how he is getting back to content creation and also trying out other new online products and how Hollywood is “so inbred, it’s a wonder that the children have any teeth.”

Like I said, always clever.

Barry Diller needs almost no introduction–he is one of the best-known executives in the U.S., straddling a number of industries, including entertainment, online and retail. Well known, too, for his biting wit and gimlet gaze, he has recently been embroiled in a high-profile battle for control of IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI) with major investor John Malone, another noted mogul. What’s been at stake are some of the Web’s most famous names, including HSN, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, Match.com, Ask.com, CitySearch and Evite.

And then there’s Diller’s other company, travel services outfit Expedia, whose shares are surging this morning on market rumors that Diller is planning on taking it private.

• Describing him as “my favorite mogul,” Kara welcomes Diller to the stage. Is that John “Darth Vader” Malone’s light saber jutting out of his back pocket?
• Tell me what happened with Malone, Kara says, referring to Diller’s recent dust-up with Liberty Capital’s (LCAPA) John Malone
• For both John Malone and me, putting our lives in the hands of a judge in Delaware is not a desire of mine. And it was very painful–too personal. For three months my life was completely interrupted. As a friend of mine said to me, when a lawsuit is filed against you, you’re only as good as you were the day before it was filed.
• Kara presses for more details. I don’t think in their hearts our shareholders felt they could overturn the shareholder agreement that had been in effect for so long, Diller says. But clearly, they felt they could shake me up a bit. Kara recalls one shareholder telling her his goals was to “humiliate Diller.”

  

• “I don’t know how long I’ll be at this,” Diller muses. “Maybe as long as Rupert … certainly not as long as Sumner, however old he is, wherever he is, alive or dead.”

• Diller talking about the difficulties of wrangling employees of a company as large as IAC. Kara: “So what is IAC now?” Diller says come August, IAC will be a series of five different businesses all related to one another through Internet life. He describes IAC as a business-organizing principle.
• Kara asks what benefits that strategy offers. Search engine optimization for one thing, says Diller.
• Shifting gears a bit: What does Diller see himself getting involved in in the future? Diller says he’s been seeking out trouble and trying to solve it, but what he’d like to do is make trouble. “The truth is,” says Diller, “if you have a decent idea and there’s a business model to it, you need to stay with it.”
• Kara asks about the Hollywood writers strike. Diller: Hollywood is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth. … How dumb can you be to allow a writers’ strike during a time when there’s such a huge play being made for the TV audience?

• Moving on to search. How’s Ask.com doing? Diller: Well, we’re not No. 5 …
• Kara asks for Diller’s thoughts on Microhoo. Diller says one party is very smart, the other not so much. Which is which, asks Kara. Diller: I’ll leave that to you to decide. A few moments later, he says he doubts Yahoo will remain independent.
• Kara asks: Is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal a good idea? Diller thinks it is. That said, he also feels Ask is successful, “Google is irrelevent to Ask” and Ask’s product is superior to Google’s. So take that previous comment with a grain of salt. “For us,” says Diller, “Google is not the issue.” He then goes on to note that Google controls about 60% of the search market in which Ask competes. Diller seems to think that someday, when Ask has increased its queries enough it will get an opening, Google will stumble and Ask will triumph.
• Kara asks about Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. Diller says it’s meaningless, but adds that Facebook is a great service. It’s got nice tools that draw you in and keep you engaged. Diller doesn’t like the term most often used to describe Facebook, though. “Social networks … that’s a dumb-ass phrase if I ever heard one.”
• Diller notes that community, which is what drives Facebook, is what has made TripAdvisor so successful.
• Kara asks about Hulu. Diller dismisses it as a distribution tool. it might become something else, but that’s all it is right now.
• Diller goes from talking about “tools” to “post-tools” and something or other converging with something else. He also mentions that micro-payments will have to be instituted as well.
• Moving on to Q and A: How do you distinguish tenacity from stupidity? Diller: I think there is a certain amount of stupidity in tenacity. Once you get something out in the marketplace there is always going to be someone who takes issue with it. It’s OK to be a little bit stupid, as long you don’t bet the farm at the same time.

For more coverage, see Barron’s Tech Trader Daily and The Wall Street Journal.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

“We have certainly not bitten an inch out of the hide of Google,” Diller said earlier this week. “I’ve been daunted by the progress of that. … The challenge of the year … is to get people to try [Ask], experiment with it and then adopt it.”

With that in mind, Diller’s making some changes. Ask.com Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone–who claimed the CEO spot in April 2006 when Steve Berkowitz took a job at Microsoft–is leaving the company in a management shake-upr that will see former Match.com CEO Jim Safka take his place.

News of the leadership change comes as Ask parent InterActiveCorp prepares to spin off its HSN (Home Shopping Network), Ticketmaster, Interval International and LendingTree properties. “These changes are intended to strengthen and streamline the operating structure at IAC, both leading up to our intended spin-offs, and beyond,” said IAC CEO Diller.

Well, we’ll have to see about that. Certainly, Safka seems like a worthy candidate for the job. As CEO of Match.com from 2004 to 2006, he grew the site’s membership and revenues substantially. That said, Lanzone is also a very smart guy. If he wasn’t able to turn Ask into a legitimate player in the search market, one wonders if anyone can.

Much, much, much.

Yesterday, the battle between InterActiveCorp’s Barry Diller and John Malone of Liberty Media (pictured here in cartoon form) got much more interesting.

As luck would have it, I will be interviewing Diller onstage at the Monaco Media Forum in Monte-Carlo this week–yes, it’s as glamorous as it sounds–so now there will be lots more to talk to him about at the digital gathering.

Diller is an excellent interview–he’s appeared at two D conferences–as he likes to parry more than the average CEO and he is good at it.

Very good, as it turns out, when dealing with Malone.

By way of background, Liberty has indicated it wants to rid itself of the 24% of IAC it owns. That stake has 58% super-voting rights, but it’s controlled by Diller via a past agreement.

So, Malone has been applying public pressure, leveling some choice barbs at Diller.

In a previous piece in The Wall Street Journal, Malone came out with this gem: “There was a time when there was, I think, a 20% Barry premium. Today you could argue there is a Barry discount.”

To deal with the pressure, Diller made the move to carve up the $9 billion holding company, made up of a variety of Internet properties, chopping and dicing more than a Ginsu knive demonstrator selling his heart out on his HSN cable-shopping network (see IAC revenue chart below).

It’s a major reversal for Diller, who has spent many years assembling IAC and who even talked about the importance of its synergies. Now, under his proposal, it will be split into five parts, all separately traded, essentially separating the wheat from the chaff.

Faster-growing and more prominent Web outfits Ask.com, Citysearch and Match.com will remain in IAC. HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval International and LendingTree would become separate, much as Diller’s travel sites became in a previous deal in 2005.

And under terms of Liberty’s proxy agreement with Diller, Liberty could get its stock power back in the spun companies–the ones Diller does not care about as much.

Even Malone was warily pleased. “It unsticks some things,” he said in another article yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.

Well, at least it’s a both tastily complex horse-trading scheme, typical of Diller, but also has a simplicity to it.

Still, Diller faces some basic Internet issues as he seeks a slimmer future.

For example, Ask, which just re-signed its guaranteed ad deal with Google, is innovative in its search results approach in a way Yahoo should be (we’ll forgive the company its misguided Kato Kaelin ad campaign).

But it is still a small player, with 5% of the U.S. market (although a network of sites it has gives it a bit more clout), which limits its scope and power.

In other words, small may be beautiful, but it’s still small.