Online Dating

Video is in. After the explosive success of Snapchat, competitor social networks scrambled to launch Stories features of their own. Instagram’s copycat proved so popular that Instagram Stories usage surpassed all Snapchat activity in April 2017.

Yet despite the success stories, online dating remains mysteriously absent from that race to innovate. On the surface, the search for love seems like an ideal candidate for video - if a picture on a profile is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth several times that - but few dating services have dared incorporate video into their features.

Hinge and Lively hope to be at the forefront of the eventual, seemingly inevitable, push to make video a regular part of the digital dating experience. Lively, a video-based social app, recently announced the release of augmented live video chat, while Hinge debuted a feature to add video clips to profiles.

Once upon a time, the world’s great lovers wooed with songs and sonnets. Today, we express our deepest feelings in 140 characters or less.

Or at least you do if you’re on Loveflutter, a dating service that has partnered with Twitter to prove social media feeds are the new windows to the soul.

Originally founded in 2013, London-based Loveflutter relaunched this May with an updated approach to modern matchmaking. Like other popular dating apps, users swipe left or right on candidates in hopes of scoring a mutual match. But unlike the competition, where singles pay attention to little more than looks, Loveflutter takes appearance out of the equation.

Jdates New Look

Earlier this month Jdate.com new makeover was launched along with an updated logo design. The JDate dating apps for iOS and Android also was updated to version 3.0.0 supporting a new and improved interface and features. Not to be left out, the JDate online magazine Jlife also got a face lift as well. All of these updates are designed with JDate users in mind and are focused on making the online dating experience easier, more streamlined, and engaging.

One of the main changes includes profile browsing. It has been simplified offering 5 main options for sorting members including New, Online, Distance, Match %, and LookBook. Each of these views are based on what you are seeking (called Discovery Preferences) and include attributes like gender and age range. These can be easily changed on the browsing page (or on your profile) to refine your searching.

The new features of Tinder Gold!

Tinder introduced swiping to the dating app world and online dating has never been the same. Now, the company is striving to evolve beyond its image as a hookup app and deliver more value to its customers through its premium services and new features.

The latest offering is Tinder Gold – a premium service (as is Tinder Plus) that allows members to see who has swiped right on their profiles in advance. This allows users to eliminate the guesswork involved in whether or not their matches already “liked” them before they make a decision to “like” them back.

According to Tinder, it will also speed up the process of finding a match, because you aren’t waiting around to see if someone you’re interested in swipes right on you, which can be a big time suck in online dating.

Augmented reality: not just for Pokemon anymore.

AR has long been a holy grail of the tech world. Everyone wants to do it, but almost no one is doing it well. The explosive popularity of Pokemon Go proved commercially successful AR is finally within reach, and if there’s any industry other than gaming that seems perfect for this futuristic tech, it’s dating.

A Los Angeles company announced in June that it plans to launch the world’s first augmented reality dating app later this year. Called FlirtAR, the app will use a range of innovative solutions to identify nearby daters, measure compatibility, and make matches with just a point of your smartphone.

"FlirtAR will use facial recognition, geolocation, and augmented reality to show user dating profiles and begin conversations with potential dates in the real world and in real time," said founder Renan Godinho.

Dating apps aren’t afraid to embrace trends. Love bacon? Or beards? Or Canadians? There’s an app for that. Dozens of niche services capitalize on the latest news and pop culture obsessions, yet there’s one trend online dating has strangely skipped over: video.

Though Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat put video front-and-center, the majority of big-name dating apps don’t allow users to share or upload videos. Attempts to integrate video, or launch new apps that are video-focused, have largely failed.

Does video dating belong to the ‘80s, when singles would record personal profiles on VHS in hopes of being distributed to a compatible match?