Social Networks

There’s no doubt about it, mobile dating is on the rise, and poised to take over the traditional online dating industry.

The figures are staggering: mobile dating apps were a billion-dollar industry in 2011, and by 2016, the market is poised to be worth 2.3 billion. This is a huge opportunity for some of the newer dating app developers, and also an opportunity for traditional online dating companies to improve their mobile platforms, as most have been doing the past couple of years.

While many app companies offer free downloads, they make money through advertising deals or through “freemium” services – that is, offering the basic service for free with added “extras” like more matches or instant communication features for a price.

According to an article in The Washington Post, a recent conference in June brought together people from the tech industry to try out different mobile dating apps for a couple of weeks, to see how they fared. The experiences varied for both men and women, with most agreeing that mobile dating offered a more casual dating experience. However, the more a dating app mimicked real life, the more successful the users’ experience with it.

Many daters find a level of comfort in apps that verify through Facebook or other means, for obvious reasons. With online dating, there is a safety factor to consider, especially for women, when you are meeting a complete stranger. There are also plenty of fake dating profiles with traditional sites and some apps, sometimes used to lure unsuspecting singles.

Most mobile apps however are tied to social media accounts like Facebook in order to verify that the dater is a real person. This adds a layer of security that allow users of an app like Hinge to meet someone they don’t know through friends.

Of course, meeting someone through friends is preferable in real life, so it makes sense that it is also preferable in a mobile dating app. Coffee Meets Bagel is an app that provides matches through your Facebook circles – that is, friends of friends - so you have to have a mutual friend in order to date. According to the company, the more mutual friends two singles have, the more likely they are to say yes to a date. In fact, if they have four mutual friends, they are 90% more likely to say yes.

This isn’t a coincidence. Since so many people are online dating, and dating with technology can feel intimidating to many, it makes the experience easier when you have friends in common.

Will newer dating apps come up with even more organic ways of meeting people? Since the mobile dating industry is only getting bigger, it seems the likely choice.

To find a list of popular services that you can use on your phone, please check out our Dating Apps category.

Do people tend to speak up more about issues facing our society because of social media? Does everyone’s voice get heard? If you were to look at any Facebook feed, you’d probably say it’s a great tool for discussing issues and stating opinions. It’s given many people a voice, and the ability to craft a thought and publicize it.

But a recent study by Pew Research points to something else – namely, that people have quite the opposite reaction when it comes to social media: they are afraid to share their views. There is a tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared. This tendency is called the “spiral of silence.”

Social media has only deepened this tendency, at least as Pew researched human behavior pre-Internet compared to what is taking place now. Facebook and Twitter especially seem to advocate for those who hold minority opinions to use their platforms to voice them, but many users haven’t.

Pew conducted a survey of 1,801 adults, focusing on one important public issue that most Americans had heard about: the Edward Snowden revelation about government surveillance of Americans’ phone and email records. Pew says they chose this issue because Americans were divided about the issue - whether Snowden’s leaks to the media were justified or whether the surveillance policy itself was a good or bad idea.

The research firm surveyed people’s opinions about the leaks, their willingness to talk about the revelations in either in-person or online settings, and their perceptions of the views of other people, both online and offline.

It turns out, people were less willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story over social media than they were in person, with 86% willing to discuss in person versus only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users who were willing to post about it on those platforms. In addition, in both personal and online settings, people were more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them. For example, those who felt their co-workers agreed with them were about three times more likely to say they’d join a workplace conversation about the Snowden situation.

It is similar with Facebook users – those who thought their friends would agree with them were also more likely to post their opinion about the issue, but those who weren’t sure were less likely. Facebook and Twitter users were also less likely to share their opinions in person with friends, say over dinner, if they felt that their Facebook friends didn’t agree with them.

Many people might decide that sharing political viewpoints over Facebook or Twitter might alienate friends or colleagues. This is also a reason why people refrain from sharing information that is too personal. Regardless, the Pew study shows that Americans may be a lot less willing than we assumed to share their true feelings over social media.

A recent article in The New York Times shed light on a particular problem that’s been rearing its ugly head lately: companies are conducting secret experiments with users of social media and online dating sites. Facebook recently revealed that it manipulated the emotional content of news feeds of 700,000 people to see if emotions were contagious. In addition, OkCupid recently shared the results of its own three secret studies of users.

In one test, OkCupid obscured profile pictures so that people could communicate, but they couldn’t see who they were communicating with. The dating site found that members had more meaningful conversations, exchanged more contact details, and responded to first messages more often. When pictures were revealed, many conversations stopped.

In another test, OkCupid hid profile text to see how it affected personality ratings. In general, more attractive users were regarded as more personable – in other words, users were equating looks with personality – even though there wasn’t much information to go on.

The third experiment was the cause of the most controversy, where the site lied to a portion of users, telling them that matches who were (according to OkCupid algorithms) 90% compatible were actually only 30%, and matches with very little compatibility were told they had high compatibility. The end result? Communication went up when people thought they were being matched with someone very compatible, because OkCupid gave them that impression of compatibility, even if it wasn’t the truth.

While it’s interesting to note that people can be swayed by looks and influenced by what a dating site tells them might work, is it really going to improve the overall experience of online dating? In other words, we might track people’s behavior to understand it a little better, but deceiving people to see how they behave is a slippery slope, and doesn’t really improve the current dating experience on OkCupid (or any site). As the study noted, as soon as the pictures were revealed, people went back to their old patterns of behavior.

Facebook and OkCupid aren’t the only sites studying user behavior, and probably aren’t the only sites conducting experiments on users. But before we continue down this path, it’s important to ask: who are these studies really benefitting? Are they helping us to become more open-minded daters? So far, not really.

The study succeeded in making online daters even more cynical about online dating. How do they know if what OkCupid is telling them about compatibility or ratings is true? It makes the already confusing world of dating a little less friendly and upfront. Dating needs more honesty, not less.

Just when you think Facebook couldn’t possibly get any bigger than it already is, it goes and shatters all expectations. For the 8^th quarter in a row, Facebook’s earnings beat projections.

Much of that growth is in mobile, where Facebook is growing twice as fast as it is compared to its services as a whole. Facebook currently logs 654 million daily mobile users and 1.07 billion mobile users each month. Thanks to the continued increase in smartphone usage, 62% of the social network’s ad revenue came from mobile in Q2. In total, Facebook now has 829 million daily users and 1.32 billion monthly users. Altogether, they are responsible for a spectacular 2^nd quarter for Facebook. The company beat Wall Street’s estimated earnings of $2.81 billion to end Q2 2014 with $2.91 billion in revenue.

Here’s how that stacks up against Q1 2014:

• Facebook's total user count is up 3.125% from 1.28 billion total monthly users to 1.32 billion
• Total daily user count is up 3.36% from 803 million to 829 million
• Monthly mobile user count is up 5.9% from 1.01 billion to 1.07 billion
• Daily mobile user count is up 7.4% from 609 million to 654 million

Revenue isn't the only way Facebook is exceeding expectations. Some critics have said the social network is losing its influence with Western users, but its monthly user count in the USA and Canada grew by 2 million this quarter. And for anyone who dared to suggest that Facebook wouldn't survive the transition from desktop to mobile, Facebook's 391 million mobile-only users dwarf its 240 million desktop-only users.

Internationally, Facebook is showing equally impressive numbers. Ad revenue is up everywhere, and the site hit an all-time high average revenue per user in every region around the world.

The only low point was payments revenue, which Facebook largely derives from the 30% tax on the in-app purchases from its Web games platform. Total payments revenue dropped slightly to $234 million from $237 million in Q1. On the plus side, it's still up 9% compared to Q2 2013.

On the horizon for Facebook now is the launch of Facebook Audience Network, the company’s mobile ad network that will bring in revenue by incorporating its targeted ads in other companies' apps. Another big development is Slingshot, a photo and video messaging app that Facebook hopes will be a competitor for Snapchat.

When asked for his thoughts on Facebook’s remarkable 2^nd quarter, all CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to say was “We had a good second quarter. Our community has continued to grow, and we see a lot of opportunity ahead as we connect the rest of the world.”

To find out if this social network makes a good dating tool you can read our Facebook review.

If you’ve been anywhere near a news source lately, you probably heard about Facebook’s big news feed experiment. The social network manipulated the news feeds of hundreds of thousands of users to see if the emotion they absorbed through reading content on their news feeds impacted the emotion they later displayed in their own posts. People were, unsurprisingly, not too psyched at the revelation that Facebook had toyed with their emotions.

Shortly afterwards OkCupid revealed that it, too, has experimented on users, and the furor started again. In their most recent experiment, OkCupid told users — falsely — that they’re compatible in order to spark more conversations. As a result, OkCupid found that perceived compatibility is just as effective as real compatibility.

Reactions to both experiments have been mixed. Some have said that OkCupid’s testing is less controversial than Facebook’s. Others have called the OkCupid experiment worse than Facebook’s. What everyone seems to agree on is that they’re not quite sure if they should be upset or not. On one hand, lying to customers seems like an obvious faux-pas. But on the other hand, isn’t that just how the Internet works?

As Josh Constine noted in a TechCrunch post, by using services like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and yes, Facebook, we agree to be part of experiments that change the way we experience the sites. The experiments are called A/B tests, and companies use them to figure how to encourage users to visit a site longer or click more things. This is nothing new.

However, there may be some room for concern. In academia, research involving human subjects is severely limited and carefully monitored by review boards to ensure that it is not deceptive and harm is minimized. Where companies are concerned, there’s no such thing as a review board. It’s up to the companies themselves to abide by the core principles of ethical research.

So how should you feel about Facebook’s and OkCupid’s experiments?

Any way you want. Unlike those two companies, I’m not here to manipulate into doing or feeling anything.

But if asked to take a stand, I’d have to put myself pro-OkCupid and less-than-convinced about Facebook. Facebook deliberately tried to change users’ emotions for the worse by manipulating content in their feeds, all without their consent. It’s hard to get behind that, no matter how much you enjoy psychological studies. For OkCupid, I’m willing to give a pass. At the end of the day, those kinds of experiments are just OkCupid doing its job. Without testing, OkCupid would never improve its ability to match users – and that’s the whole reason we’re there in the first place.

Now here's some news you probably never expected to hear: not only are more people meeting on social networks (which doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who hasn't been living in a remote jungle for the last decade), but their relationships are also happier than those that begin off-line in more traditional ways.

What?

Yes, apparently it's true. Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, discovered that 7% of people who married after meeting online didn’t meet in matchmaking chat rooms or on online dating sites. In fact, they met for the first time on social networking sites like Facebook.

Surprised by his finding, given that dating isn’t the purpose of social networking websites, Hall decided to investigate further. He was curious to learn more about who is meeting their significant others this way and how well their relationships fair. He put together a sample of 19,131 participants who'd been married once between 2005 in 2012. Each participant had met their partner in one of four ways: online dating sites, e-mail or instant messaging, online communities like chat rooms or virtual reality games, or social networking sites.

Hall found that those who met on social networking sites were more likely to be younger, married more recently, and African-American compared to those who met via other digital methods. He also found that, when compared based on marital satisfaction, the partners who met via social networking reported being just as happy as those who were introduced any other way – even on online dating sites, which are designed to nurture connection and tout their compatibility benefits.

What surprised Hall even more, however, was that the relationships that started on social media were actually happier than those that begin offline, in traditional ways like being introduced by mutual friends.

What explains his findings?

Hall has a couple of theories. “I think that social networking is the digital version of being introduced by friends,” he says. So although the medium has changed in the 21st century, the method has not. Social networks also have another potentially huge advantage over dating services: there is way less pressure. Online dating can be intensely stressful, so it's not hard to believe that romance might blossom better under more relaxed, Facebook friend-ly circumstances.

The result is conversations on social networking sites that are more casual and low risk, and removed from the anxiety of traditional online dating. Low risk + high reward = hello, online romance!