General News

The Federal Trade Commission announced it is suing Match Group for using fake notifications to trick users into paying for subscriptions to Match.com. The FTC also alleges that Match Group unfairly exposed consumers to the risk of fraud and engaged in other allegedly deceptive and unfair practices to induce users to subscribe and keep them subscribed to the dating service.

Match.com allows users to create a profile and use some of the platform’s features for free. However, users are prohibited from responding to messages from admirers unless they upgrade to a higher membership tier with a subscription fee. According to the FTC’s complaint, Match sent misleading advertisements to users with free accounts stating that someone had expressed interest in them and encouraging them to subscribe to the service to view the message and the identity of its sender. Many users purchased subscriptions as a result of these deceptive ads, believing they were going to communicate with a real user who could be “the one.”

The word “transparency” gets thrown around frequently. We ask for transparency from governments, we ask for transparency from companies, we ask for transparency from our communities. On a personal level, transparency means openness, communication and accountability - being your true self and building relationships based on trust and authenticity.

Needless to say, online dating does not always live up to these high ideals. Photos are staged and edited to conceal perceived flaws. Profiles are carefully crafted to attract potential suitors. The problem of people creating false identities online to lure unsuspecting lovers is so prevalent that we’ve given it a name - catfishing - and an MTV show. It’s no wonder modern singles are so skeptical of each other.

In 1994, visionary entrepreneur Gary Kremen used a $2,500 loan to create Match.com. Only 5 percent of Americans were using the internet at the time - and even fewer were using it to find love - but Match.com became the world’s first online dating service. More than 20 years later, it’s still one of the industry’s biggest and most dynamic players.

Though Kremen’s name may not be as famous as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, his influence on the internet is immense. Author and award-winning journalist David Kushner chronicled the rise of Kremen and Match.com in The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise. Less than six months after Kushner’s book was released, it’s set to get the Hollywood treatment with a small screen adaptation.

Tinder's New Series is called Swipe Night

Tinder will be releasing an original six-episode video series over its app, according to an exclusive report in Variety Magazine.

The new series will be a “choose your own adventure” story available to users when they log into the app. It’s interactive content, so users are able to swipe left and right to continue to different versions of the story. The basic premise involves the apocalypse, and asks the question: “Who would you spend your last night alive with?”

More than a year after the company first announced the feature, Facebook Dating has finally made its way to the US. Anyone with a Facebook account who is over 18 can opt into the dating service from the Facebook mobile app.

"We've been really slow, actually, with this rollout," Charmaine Hung, a product manager at Facebook Dating, told CNN Business. "We really wanted to make sure we got it right because dating is so personal."

Was Facebook Dating worth the wait? Here’s what you need to know before giving it a try.

Update 2019-11-18: The POF Singles Events App has since been removed from Google Play.

We thought we would write about the POF Singles Event app after POF closed the forums at the beginning of the summer.

For the past number of years the forums were still being used by a lot of POF users as a way to organize single events. On the leadup to the closure, POF disabled regular forum posting in May. Users could still read all forum posts but that functionality would disappear by the end of June according to the message on the forums. For the forums, POF also still allowed Event Hosts to create and promote events while a promised new event creation service was being worked on. At first I though this might be something integrated into the website and existing POF dating apps. I then found the POF Singles Events app on both iTunes and Google Play and then realized they may be referring to this app.

It was about 7 weeks late but by August 23rd the POF forums were closed for good.