Online Dating

Tinder Online now Available!

Some would argue that Tinder is the app that started it all. Though it wasn’t the first dating or social networking application to launch, it’s the one that rocketed mobile matchmaking into the public consciousness and made the swipe an iconic part of pop culture. News outlets called it “the next Facebook.”

In the years following its 2012 launch, Tinder has spread to 190 countries, grown to 1.6 billion swipes per day, inspired 1.5 billion dates per week, and racked up more than 20 billion total matches. Yet in all that time, despite all those impressive decimal places, there was one thing it never did: go online.

Tinder remained a mobile-only service until March 2017, when it made an announcement many had been waiting for. Tinder Online had arrived, allowing users to swipe from any browser, on any device, anywhere in the world - whether or not they had 4G or enough memory free on their smartphones.

Well, not quite anywhere.

The San Francisco Bay Area lives and breathes tech. As home to the iconic companies of Silicon Valley, and a mind-blowing number of plucky startups, there are few places in the world with a more unabashed love of all things that come with the digital age.

Naturally, that extends to dating. Countless dating apps and websites call the region home, helping its tech-savvy and time-strapped residents find love despite their busy lives. The latest to join their company is Belong, a smart dating app that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to curate personalised matches and social experiences for accomplished singles.

Belong makes the bold promise that it’s “reinventing the modern dating experience.” The app becomes smarter the more you use it, allowing the machine learning mechanism to provide hyper-targeted matches and date suggestions designed just for you.

On September 7, Su Xiangmao, the 37-year-old multi-millionaire entrepreneur behind a Skype-like app called WePhone, jumped to his death from the 15th floor of his Beijing apartment building. He left digital suicide notes on Google Plus and Sina Weibo, as well as a disturbing welcoming message on WePhone: "Company owner is forced to death by his evil wife Zhai Xinxin, and the app will stop working." The message included Zhai's phone number and her national ID information.

Su’s notes told a tragic tale of marriage gone wrong. He met his 29-year-old ex-wife in March on Jiayuan.com, China’s largest online dating website, where both were VIP members with "verified" personal profiles. In the months that followed, Su spent 13 million yuan ($1.96 million) on Zhai, showering her with gifts like a Tesla Model X and a seaside apartment in South China's Hainan Province. They married in June.

One month later, they divorced. Su agreed to pay Zhai 10 million yuan as part of their settlement. If he failed to do so, he wrote, Zhai threatened to report his business, which operated in a legal grey area, and his tax evasion to police.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. A dating app is teaming up with a voice-activated digital assistant to help tech-savvy singles find love hands-free.

Earlier this month, eHarmony announced a partnership with Amazon to bring a branded skill to Alexa. Enabling it allows eHarmony users to hear their matches and messages by voice, ask for more details about their dating prospects, and have photos of their connections sent to their smartphones.

This time around, it’s not eHarmony or Alexa that’s in the news. Plenty Of Fish has announced an integration with the Google Assistant on Google Home, as well as eligible Android and iOS phones. Same premise, different devices.

How Hinge Matchmaker Works

We normally frown upon butting into the love lives of others, but Hinge has launched a new app that hopes to make it socially acceptable to hook up your friends.

Hinge Matchmaker is designed to let you pair up your pals who are already on the dating app. After downloading the app and logging in, Matchmaker will scan your Facebook friends list for people who have Hinge profiles. The app then presents two of your single Facebook friends at a time, leaving it up to you to decide whether you think they’d be a solid match.

If the answer is yes, you can suggest the match and even add an icebreaker message to get the ball rolling. Your suggested match will see each other on the regular Hinge app, along with your note, and can choose whether to continue the conversation or not. There’s also the option to focus on a specific friend’s dating life by locking their profile, which allows the matchmaker to rotate through the available matches for that person alone.

A woman from Canberra, Australia has been suspended by dating app Tinder for asking too many matches whether or not they registered to vote, so they could receive a ballot to vote on marriage equality.

She originally started asking friends and followers to register to vote over social media, and after many of them did, she took to Tinder to try and engage more people.

According to website Junkee, the woman, known as “Lizzy” reported that a lot of men thanked her for the reminder and were glad she reached out to them to advocate for a worthy cause. One man even shared her message along with the link to the voter registration site to all of his matches.