Dating Services

Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home. According to Facebook data analysts, the season is also prime time for daters to “clear the clutter” in their love lives - in other words, it’s breakup season.

In a paper from 2014, Lars Backstrom of Facebook and Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University analyzed user data from Facebook in search of insight into modern love lives. Amongst other things, they found that:

• About half of all Facebook relationships that have survived three months are likely to survive to four years or longer
• Heterosexual couples are generally around the same age, even as they get older
• Same-sex couples display the stereotypical age gap as they grow older, leveling off at about 4.5 years difference after age 38
• How much interest couples have in each other is a better predictor of love than having a lot of friends in common

Online dating is one of the most popular ways to meet people, thanks to free apps and services like Plenty of Fish and Tinder. But many daters opt to be more particular in their search, and are willing to pay for a more curated experience, whether it’s online dating, matchmaking, or even “casual dating” services, like escorts.

According to a new study done by Statista for the Digital Market Outlook (DMO), the United States has the largest share of adults worldwide who are actively paying for a dating service. More than a quarter – 26 percent - of daters in the U.S. are paying for dating services, followed by the UK at almost 21 percent and Germany with 17 percent.

Daters in France, China and Saudi Arabia were the least likely to pay for a dating service according to the study, with 13%, 11% and 5% of daters respectively who were active paying customers at the time of the study.

Singles in New York have a new way to date, network, recharge, and bee social in the big city. Bumble, the popular female-focused dating app, has opened its first physical location in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. The pop-up installation has been dubbed ‘The Hive’ and is set to remain open for the month of June.

The space is decked out from head-to-toe in Bumble’s branding, featuring yellow walls, honeycomb shapes, and plenty of bee-related puns. The Hive is open to anyone who wants to stop by - users and non-users alike - whether they’re looking for a date spot, a place to hang with friends, a co-working space, or just a respite from the constant buzz of city life.

“It will follow the format of Bumble and offer something for everyone,” Whitney Wolfe, founder and chief executive officer of Bumble, told Mashable. “A place for dates to meet, friends to do activities together, and co-working for our bizz users. Bumble has allowed you to build your hive digitally, and now we’re giving you an extension of that physically.”

Online dating skeptics have plenty of reasons for opting out of modern singles’ favorite way to date, but here’s one they probably hadn’t thought of yet: personal photos being stolen for use in AI experiments.

A user of Kaggle, a platform for machine learning and data science competitions which was recently acquired by Google, exploited Tinder’s API to scrape 40,000 profile photos from Bay Area users of the dating app. He used them to train artificial intelligence, and also organized the images into a downloadable facial data set called People of Tinder.

Stuart Colianni, the creator of the data set, described it as a “simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset.” He also described Tinder as offering “near unlimited access to create a facial data set” and said his scraping the app offers “an extremely efficient way to collect such data.”

Starting Thursday June 15^th until Monday June 19^th eHarmony in the United States is offering free messaging of your matches. No credit card or coupon code is required. All you need to do is create a free membership and fill in your profile.

These extended free communication weekends (which are extra busy with members checking their matches) are an ideal time to give eHarmony a try to see if it is the right dating service for you. You can access the eHarmony.com service via their website or dating apps (iPhone and Android). Once your profile is complete you will receive your first batch of matches which you can review and send messages to the ones which spark your interest. eHarmony uses their matchmaking algorithm to choose high compatible matches based on your personal criteria and personality. The matches you receive have the best chance of creating a long-term relationship. The one thing during free communicate weekends which is not included are profile photos.

To find out more about this online dating service, please read our detailed review of eHarmony.

See how Bucket List works

We’re headed into summer, and online dating company Match conducted a survey to assess how many singles feel more adventurous this time of year. The results are in – 85% said that a potential date’s sense of adventure was an attractive quality, and 76% said they’d like to try something new in the coming months.

In fact, the results were overwhelmingly clear – singles crave a sense of adventure. Seventy-three percent said they would actually be more attracted to someone if they had a bucket list item in common, and 66% of singles said they would likely check off one of their bucket list items on a date.

Because of this, Match decided to create a new feature on their dating app called ‘Bucket List’ to highlight potential dates’ sense of adventure.