Types (Niche)

While Justin Bieber is trending on Twitter, what's trending in the world of online dating?

According to the Google Barometer Blog, mobile dating is the newest trend sweeping the U.K. Bickey Russell and Elizabeth Song, Senior Industry Analyst and Analyst Intern, respectively, for Google UK, studied the rising popularity of mobile dating and found that "the volume of Google searches on mobile devices related to dating grew by 215% YoY ['Year Over Year'] since 2008" in the UK alone. And, in an even more remarkable turn, "the volume of dating queries on mobile phones shot up ten fold in just three years' time."

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent, the usage of mobile devices - and the constant Internet connectivity they provide - to access dating websites to search for potential matches and answer messages from interested members has become more and more popular. The market is so large, in fact, that Juniper, a market research firm, has estimated that "the overall mobile dating sector will grow to $1.4 billion worldwide by 2013." That's right - $1.4 billion in just three years. Google research has also found that searches from laptops and desktop computers for "mobile dating" and "text dating" have grown over 72% YoY in the UK.

So what can on-the-go online dating do for you? New interactive features are being invented constantly, allowing you to take advantage of countless new online dating opportunities like proximity dating, which uses GPS or Bluetooth technology to alert users when other singles are nearby. Mobile and location dating also introduce a real-life context into the online dating scene, "making the process less detached from users' everyday lives, social networks, and gathering places."

If you're interested in trying mobile dating, you don't have to venture far outside your comfort zone - many major dating sites, like Match, eHarmony, and JDate, have mobile apps available for download. If you're ready for something new, however, check out these popular apps:

1. Meet Moi: Meet Moi is a location-based mobile dating app that updates your location in real-time and alerts you when a match is nearby. Their basic service is free.

2. SpeedDate.com: Members can search through millions of profiles and start conversations via email with prospective matches. SpeedDate provides an advanced set of filters that allows users to search based on specific criteria, as well as a tagging feature that ensures that favorite profiles are saved.

3. Grindr: Grindr is the largest location-based dating app for gay, bi, and curious men. Grindr is free, and has about 600,000 users per month (about 250,000 users per day, who log on approximately eight times within a 24 hour period!).

4. Zoosk: Zoosk won the award for Best Mobile Dating Site at the Internet Dating Conference this year, and is consistently a #1 dating app in the iTunes Store. The app has all of the functionality of the website, with a GPS location tagging feature.

For more information on the service which won the award Best Mobile Dating Site, please read our Zoosk review. For other dating sites which also offer their services over a phone, check out our Mobile Phone Dating category.

Back in July we mentioned that the PlentyOfFish iPhone App would be here in a few weeks. Well it is now December and I must confess, I forgot all about it.

It looks like the iPhone PlentyOfFish Mobile App has been available on iTunes since August. The current version is 1.02 which was released on Oct 22, 2010. It is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad as long as they have iOS 3.0 or later installed on them. Most of the reviews of this iPhone dating app seem to indicate that is okay (it has a 3 out of 5 star rating) but lacks a few features and should just be used as a supplement if you can't use your laptop at the moment.

Features of the app include searching, checking your matches and sending and receiving PlentyOfFish email messages.

For more information on this dating site, read our review of PlentyOfFish.

They may have been shy about trying online dating when the trend first started, but now Baby Boomers make up the fastest-growing demographic in the online dating market.

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, online dating sites have seen a surge in memberships of those 50+ looking for love. At Match.com, memberships of those aged 50-65 has increased 89% in the last five years. And on JDate.com, members in the 50+ age group jumped 40% in only one year. In fact, its parent company has a website dedicated specifically to the Boomer market called SingleSeniorsMeet.com, and is its fastest-growing property.

Dr. Helen Fisher, anthropologist and consultant for Chemistry.com, notes that Boomers are the perfect candidates for online dating. They have met most of the people in their network of friends and business colleagues, have limited time, and don't usually go to bars, so the Internet is becoming a more appealing way of meeting new people.

Female Boomers seem to be making the most impact, according to Fisher. She states, "Women are powering into the job market; they have more disposable income so they can walk out of bad marriages...The expectation now is that older people are going to date, and remarry."

Baby Boomers have also had more experience with long-term relationships than younger online daters, and are therefore more certain about what they want in a relationship, which works for online dating. According to Match.com, 71% of members 50+ are divorced and 11% are widowed.

"Many Boomer daters sign up for online dating post-divorce or after a long dating hiatus," said JDate spokesperson Arielle Schechtman. "They are busy professionals, so being able to learn about potential dates online, on their own time schedules, makes online dating more valuable to them than to other age groups."

For more information on the dating sites mentioned in this post, please read our Match.com review, Chemistry review, and our JDate review.

According to Ilana Angel, a popular blogger for the Jewish Journal website, earlier this month she had gone out to lunch with a few people who work at the online dating site JDate. JDate had wanted to see how her search for a Jewish match was going. Her previous two relationships with men had been the result of using JDate but this time when she joined, she found she wasn't having the same success. One thought Angel had was, that the men were scared away because she blogs about her dating experiences (even though she doesn't use real names). JDate decided on this lunch to share their recommendations on how Angel can use their site better to find a man she likes and who is not worried about dating a professional blogger.

She hasn't posted yet on how the lunch went with JDate. When she does we will make sure to let you know.

You can read Ilana Angel blog post here and you can find out more about the dating site she talks about by reading our review of JDate.com.

The "Are You Interested" Facebook application is owned by SNAP Interactive. This app recently became the largest dating application on Facebook with 13,262,420 monthly active users. Just a month ago they had only around 8,424,000 monthly active users. Snap Interactive also posted 3rd quarter revenues of $1.65 million which was an increase of over 100 percent when compared to the same period last year. With these rising revenue numbers it looks like Snap Interactive new found traffic is of high quality.

The second largest Facebook dating application is Zoosk with 7,514,381 monthly active users. While "Are you Interested" may have a larger Facebook presence, Zoosk still has a much larger overall membership base thanks to the popularity of their dating website. Zoosk Facebook users also get to interact with the members of the dating website, and vice versa.

For more on this story, check out All Facebook. To find out more about dating on Facebook, please take a look at our Facebook Dating reviews category.

AshleyMadison.com has now opened their affair website to married men and women in the United Kingdom. For those of you who haven't heard of this site before it is described as a traditional dating site but for people who are already married. For UK members it costs £49 for 100 credits. With these credits members can email someone for 5 credits, chat in real-time for another 30 credits and send a virtual gift from 20 to 50 credits.

Apparently there are plans to spend upwards of £10million in advertising if Ashley Madison can get their ads approved by the Advertising Standards Authority. With this type of marketing budget Ashley Madison expects to have 1 million UK members in 3 months.

For more on this story read TNT Magazine.