Starting Friday August 18^th and running to the end of day on Monday August 21^st eHarmony.com members can communicate with their matches for free in the United States.

No credit card is required for this promotion so if you are interested in trying out the dating service known for creating long-term relationships then this weekend is the ideal time for you to find out how everything works at eHarmony before spending any money. All you need to do is create a free membership on eHarmony, fill in your profile information, and then take the personality questionnaire. The questionnaire is an important part of the automated matchmaking and takes about 20 minutes to complete. When you are finished you will receive your first daily batch of high quality matches which you can then send messages to the ones which spark your interest. The only thing not included in free messaging of matches, is viewing of profile photos.

Love can feel like a game sometimes, and in this case, it’s literal. Happn is testing a new gamified feature for singles in Spain, a simple but addictive game called CrushTime.

CrushTime is designed to give users another opportunity to connect with people they cross paths with in real life. At the start of the game, CrushTime presents four users you’ve recently been near. One is a person who has already liked you (a “Crush”), and it’s up to you to figure out which one it is.

If your intuition is on point and you guess correctly, you can start chatting in-app immediately with your new match. If you’re wrong, it’s simply a non-mutual like and no one knows but you. You can either start a new game or try again if you’re into one of the remaining profiles.

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.