General News

It seems every online business is tapping into the lucrative and popular online dating industry. The latest newbie?  Goldstar, the company that offers online discounts for tickets to your favorite shows, events and concerts.

It makes sense for Goldstar to get involved in the dating scene, since they already provide tickets to fun events, a perfect setting for a blind date. How About We and other online dating services are already focused on matching people through events and by planning first dates, hoping to attract users who are tired of endlessly messaging matches, which can happen with apps like Tinder.

But how exactly does it work?

A year ago, Vanity Fair ran an article dramatically called Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’. It caused a major stir in the media - everyone was debating whether the swipe made love easier to find or wiped romance from the equation completely.

The article wasn’t just a catalyst for discussion amongst daters and writers. Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of the dating app Hinge, was also struck by what it had to say.

“It was the first among many realizations that Hinge had morphed into something other than what I originally set out to build (an app for real relationships),” McLeod said in an email to the Vanity Fair writer, Nancy Jo Sales. “Your honest depiction of the dating app landscape has contributed to a massive change we’re making at Hinge later this fall.”

Dating app giant Tinder is trying to expand its influence beyond the dating scene. While the dating market has essentially built the app’s user base, Tinder execs feel that moving outside of this niche to include a larger portion of the population will reap some obvious benefits.

Fear not daters, you can still swipe left and right to date people with the original Tinder app. The new app is a totally separate experience, called Tinder Stacks, and it’s basically a social media voting tool. It’s all about group decision-making.

According to an article in The Verge, Tinder works through your iMessage app to allow you to contact multiple friends and choose a bunch of pictures from your phone to send to them. Message recipients will then be able to go through your “stack” of photos and swipe left and right, depending on whether or not they approve of or like each one. (You can also add a question to the stack, such as “which dress makes me look the most sexy?”) As the voting takes place, the sender will be able to see how many likes and skips each image receives.

Bumble has been making big moves this year. First, in an effort to even the playing field, the app announced that male users must respond to women’s messages within 24 hours or they lose the match. CEO Whitney Wolfe also announced plans to take Bumble beyond dating into the world of business networking.

The company’s latest update is designed to prevent its users from falling prey to catfishers. How they intend to do it is the fun part.

Bumble’s new plan to outsmart scammers is a photo feature that prompts users to verify their accounts by submitting selfies. Yes, it’s 2016 and selfies are here to save us all.

The word “squad’ is ubiquitous in 2016, so it was only a matter of time before someone turned it into a dating app.

The thing is, Squad is not just the newest app on the mobile dating scene - it may be the year’s best new dating app.

For starters, the relationship experts on the judging panel of the inaugural US Dating Awards named it Best New Dating App 2016. It beat out The Catch, faith-based Crosspaths, video-centric Lively, and the matchmakers of Once. It’s also received write-ups from the likes of TechCrunch, Thrillist, CNN, Observer, and the Washington Post.

How many times have you been on a date where the person you’re meeting seems angry, frustrated, or negative? And how many times have you been on dates where you felt that way yourself?

We all feel negative from time to time, but it definitely affects your love life if you allow those feelings to take hold and shape your attitude towards dating. This month, dating site Match released a study based on a survey it conducted among one thousand of its users to determine how positive and negative thinking affect the dating experience.

Not surprisingly, especially with this election year, nearly 80% of Match members feel the country has become MORE negative over the last 4 years and more than half of Match members have broken up with someone because they were too negative or pessimistic. The majority of Match members agree, the most attractive attribute of positivity is the fact that it signals a good outlook on life (68%).