Just another online dating service?

Yet another online love site? Well, yes and no. It's true we're new, but we reckon we're offering something pretty different. When we looked around at the many sites that are already out there, it seemed to us that the whole thing has got a bit complicated. Most sites ask you to write long profiles about yourself, and illustrate them with a photo. Many hook you in with the promise of it being free, then charge you a subscription if you want to get in touch with someone. We don't like long profiles and photos freely available online, partly for privacy reasons (do you really want everyone in the office to be all over your description?) and partly because it seems to make the whole process a bit undignified. Some of these sites feel a bit like meat markets.

We've taken our lead, therefore, from the personal columns of old, where you had just 25 words in which to 'sell yourself', with messages from admirers passed on anonymously by the newspaper. In the old days, newspapers charged people to place their ad. These days they use premium rate phone lines.

However, the economies of scale of the Internet mean that we can now offer the whole thing 100% free, with our business funded by commercial sponsorship. So put your credit card back in your wallet, and get started straight away.

Just25words is so new that you can probably still smell the paint. We opened for business on Sunday May 18th 2008, when the Sunday Times quoted some research which we did for them. But although this particular site is brand spanking new, we're certainly not wet behind the ears. No Sir-ee. The very small team behind it came together in 2002 to launch Cybersuitors.com, a subscription-based dating service using Dr Glenn Wilson's CQ (Compatibility Quotient) test – a scientifically proved way of forecasting how well-matched couples are.

Along with Caroline Ashcroft, Glenn and I (oh sorry, I haven't introduced myself, I'm Jon Cousins, an ex-advertising creative now doing entrepreneurial stuff online) we carried out two pieces of research on the CQ Test, with married couples. We persuaded partners to take the CQ Test independent of each other, and also asked them to take a standard test of marital happiness. The results showed that the happiest couples tended to have the highest CQs. CQs are a bit like IQs, in as much as a score of 100 means that a couple is as compatible on average as any two people picked at random might be. Scores over 100 (they can go up to about 140) indicate better than average compatibiity, whilst lower scores suggest that the two people have a lot less in common.

Glenn Wilson is Reader in Personality at the University of London, and an expert in mating and dating. His work over the years has shown that 'chemistry' is a very elusive quality to forecast. It's extremely difficult to predict who someone is going to fancy. However it's much easier to measure the degree to which two people are likely to get along with each other longer term, after the new-relationship rose-tinted glasses have come off.