Milestones

The New eHarmony Homepage

On November 4th eHarmony released a massive update to their dating service. Both the website and dating apps (iOS and Android) received a complete overhaul.

It was just a year ago that eHarmony was purchased by Germany's Parship Elite Group. At that time Parship Elite Group planned to move eHarmony to their existing platform which currently runs their other dating platforms (most are in Europe). An interview with Tim Schiffers, the CEO of Parship Elite Group stated that the migration could take as long as a year but would be well worth it since they have invested a lot in their technical setup to ensure ease of maintenance and feature upgrades.

Late in 2018 eHarmony was acquired by the German broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 (Parship Elite Group). Since then they have been busy working on a large update to eHarmony which went live on November 4^th, 2019. With this update came the closure of Compatible Partners which now redirects to eHarmony with the following message:

A fresh experience is waiting for you. Log in with your existing credentials or register now to discover what‘s new.

So, it looks like current members have nothing to worry about as all active member accounts have been moved over to eHarmony so all you need to do is log in with your existing information.

IAC has announced its plan to spin off its most profitable company, Match Group, to create “two independent public companies,” according to a company statement.

Match Group is a publicly traded company and owns a suite of star dating apps like Tinder, PlentyofFish, Hinge and OkCupid among others, but IAC is still Match Group’s majority owner (with 80 percent of Match Group’s holdings). According to Tech Crunch, when the spin-off occurs, IAC says it would distribute its Match Group shares to IAC stockholders, which means IAC shareholders would have shares in both companies.

The move would allow Match Group to become a fully separate, independent company.

Tinder's New Series is called Swipe Night

Tinder will be releasing an original six-episode video series over its app, according to an exclusive report in Variety Magazine.

The new series will be a “choose your own adventure” story available to users when they log into the app. It’s interactive content, so users are able to swipe left and right to continue to different versions of the story. The basic premise involves the apocalypse, and asks the question: “Who would you spend your last night alive with?”

New Design

A few weeks ago POF banned face filters and it appears soon after on Sept 17 the Plenty of Fish website, blog and dating apps received a facelift. The dating service has moved from an all light blue fish logo and theme to a layered multi color almost neon look. The light blue color is still there but the brightness has been turned up along with the addition of pink and dark blue. The interface itself has changed to reflect these colors with a few tweaks here and there to the layout. As far as we can tell no new features have been added and none removed.

You can also see the new look reflected in the Google Play and Apple App stores POF app install pages. One thing I notice on the App store is that POF is pushing a new statistic of 17 million conversations are exchanged everyday on the service. They still list the same stat of 4 million visitors everyday from 2017 (among others like 150 million registered users and 57 million new connections every week) so it looks like the dating service POF growth has stagnated. This is in part probably the result of Tinder becoming so popular and is also probably responsible in part of the updated design (which I am still getting use to).

Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)