Online Dating

Save traveling to an untouched tribe in the Amazonian rainforest, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of Match Group.

The company was a pioneer in the industry, becoming the first major dating site to register a domain in 1995. Today Match Group offers dating products in 38 languages across more than 190 countries, and boasts a portfolio of over 45 brands including Match, OkCupid, Tinder, PlentyOfFish and Our Time.

So what keeps Match Group on top, more than two decades later?

Tired of swiping right and exchanging flirty emojis, only to be ghosted before you’ve ever met in person?

Craig Cole was disillusioned with the lack of face-to-face meetings in online dating, so he created Doppler Social App to get singles out from behind their screens and on dates IRL.

“In my experience, once I swipe right and match with someone, I immediately either connect with them through the phone and it fizzles out over two weeks, or we continue talking and make plans to meet up that never come to fruition,” Cole wrote for Built In Los Angeles. “We spend so much time ‘talking’ over text and through apps, that we never actually make time to meet each other in person. We are constantly canceling plans and flaking out on our friends or potential dates. I was tired of the disconnect." 

Free communication is back! Starting Thursday November 9^th and running to the end of day on Monday November 13^th eHarmony members can communicate with their matches for free in the United States.

To send messages at no cost on eHarmony all you need to do is create an eHarmony account. No credit card is required, just your time to create a profile and fill out the personality questionnaire. This process takes about 30 minutes and when complete you will receive your first batch of matches. On eHarmony you cannot search for members. Instead they send you a number of high quality matches everyday for you to review. If you find one or more you like you can then go ahead and send them a message. The only thing not included during this promotion are profile photos.

For more about this online dating company, please check out our review of eHarmony.

Most everyone in America has heard of Tinder, even if they haven’t used it. Many more swipe-friendly dating apps have followed in its popular wake, but still, singles are finding the dating app scene to be a little daunting, more than a little tiring, and would just like to meet someone more organically.

A new study by YouGov Omnibus found that almost half of American singles would prefer to meet a romantic partner in real life rather than through an app like Tinder. According to the study, even Millennials – the generation that brought online dating into the mainstream – prefer to meet potential dates at a bar, coffee shop, or even being set up by friends and family members over swiping right on a dating app.

Researchers surveyed over 1000 single Americans across the U.S. to find out how many have been set up on a date by friends or family, how many would like to be set up again, and how many would rather meet online.

For information on the science of attraction, few names carry more weight than Eli Finkel.

Finkel is a professor at Northwestern University who studies interpersonal attraction, marriage, conflict resolution, and how social relationships influence goal achievement. In his role as director of Northwestern’s Relationships and Motivation Lab (RAMLAB), he has published 130+ scientific papers and is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. He’s also the author of a best-selling book, The All-Or-Nothing Marriage, and was called "one of the leading lights in the realm of relationship psychology” by The Economist.

So when Finkel makes a pronouncement about dating, we listen. His most recent research has looked into dating services and matching algorithms, in hopes of answering the most important question of all: do they actually work?

PositiveSingles recently acquired PozMatch.com a HIV positive community designed to match their members together. PozMatch.com has been online since 1998.

Of the 1.2 million members PositiveSingles has over 200 thousand members who are HIV positive. This makes it a good fit to take over the PozMatch community. PositiveSingles was founded in 2002 and has become the largest dating service for singles who have an STD. The service can be accessed via the website at PositiveSingles.com and by using iOS and Android apps (found on their respective stores).

For more information you can read the press release or check out our review of PositiveSingles.