Online Dating

Welcome to the brave new world of falling in love - one that doesn’t just use technology to find matches, but also uses it to analyze your dates and determine the best of your romantic options. Evolve, launched April 2017, employs machine learning to help singles identify their dating patterns and make smarter choices.

It sounds like the creation of a sci-fi novel or a Black Mirror episode, but Evolve calls itself something much less intimidating: “the world’s first dating and relationship manager.” Unlike other dating apps, you’ll find no matches on Evolve - instead the app is designed to help you date with intention by offering personalized insights backed by data.

Each time you go on a date, log onto Evolve to enter details about the outing. Rate your date from 1 to 10, and indicate whether it ended with a kiss or “more.” Select your match’s pros and cons (the choices include “Trustworthy,” “Sketchy,” “Ambitious,” “Baggage,” “Shared Values,” and “Great Chemistry”) from a list of options. You can also add photos and basic info about people into Evolve, either manually or by letting the app pull the information for you automatically using a screenshot.

Dating apps have to set themselves apart from the rigorous competition, and it seems new features are being introduced weekly. The latest is from dating app Happn, who announced a new matching feature called “Crush Time” to help its users find matches.

Crush Time is purposefully game-like, which makes it interesting. It shows you four profiles, and you have to guess which one already liked you. If you guess correctly, you can start messaging right away with the in-app messaging feature. If you don’t guess correctly, then you don’t match (because it’s not a mutual like).

Another unique twist to Crush Time is the fact that you can’t just endlessly play the game. It pops up every so often, so you have to watch for it. (This of course adds to the stickiness of checking the Happn app more than you otherwise might). It makes the game all the more exciting when you get to play.

Plenty of Fish is keeping things fresh with an updated look for its iOS and Android apps, and a brand new feature designed to help singles get the conversation started.

PoF is all about the chat right now. After releasing Conversation Nation, the largest study of singles and conversation ever conducted, the dating service is putting communication front and center.

Data from the study found that 74 percent of single Americans believe small talk is worthwhile because it helps break the ice and provides basic information about a potential date. The majority of singles also believe a great conversation is the top indicator of a successful date. However, 61 percent of singles believe the rise in technology usage has impacted our ability to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations, and 65 percent say conversation is a lost art.

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.