Dating Services

At the recent Forbes Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia, Tinder cofounder Sean Rad made the surprise announcement that the company is launching a new premium service in early November. The upgrade will allow paying users more options beyond just swiping left and right.

This might make some Tinder fans uneasy. After all, the value of the app is in the sheer number of people using it. Will restricting certain new features to paying customers cause others to drop off and look for other cheaper alternatives for hooking up?

Not according to Rad. He says the premium service will include functions that Tinder users have long been asking for - including the ability to travel and use Tinder in multiple cities. Currently, you can only use the service locally, which means if you live in Los Angeles you can't look for hook-ups in New York.

But will people pay for this type of technology? Several hackers have taken advantage of Tinder's technology already and used it to create the very features users have been requesting and the premium Tinder will be offering - such as fooling the GPS-based technology into thinking you are in another city so you can scroll through profiles in multiple cities. Also, several hackers have come up with technology to "mass-like" profiles in mere seconds without having to manually scroll through, which is a very popular request from current Tinder users to increase their odds of a match.

And what about Tinder's current features - will new users have to start paying for basic services, or will some features be taken away to add to the new premium service? Rad says there will be no changes under the current free app, so users can rest a little easier. Forbes reported that people now swipe through 1.2 billion Tinder profiles a day, and that each day Tinder makes more than 15 million matches. The company needs to hang on to these users because its value is in the numbers. 

But Rad is trying to continue Tinder's growth, and that means it's time to add revenue - especially for investors like Barry Diller.  “We had to get our product and growth right first,” says Rad. “Revenue has always been on the road map.”

Forbes said the Tinder founder hinted at offering other types of services that go beyond dating, including features for travelers, though he didn't cite anything specific. Could we see a Tinder app that includes restaurant, car service, or hotel choices in the near future?

Clearly, Rad has big plans for his popular app. But we'll have to wait and see how the market (and their pocketbooks) respond. For more on this dating app you can read our Tinder review.

Steve Harvey has been dishing out dating advice to women quite successfully over the years, because he knows what it was like to be a man playing around without really wanting to commit. His book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, was a best-seller among the hundreds of dating advice books to hit the market. Now, he’s teamed up with Match.com to create a dating site called “Delightful” that competes directly with marriage-minded sites like eHarmony.

"Women want to date with the goal that it turns into a relationship," Harvey told The Chicago Tribune in a recent article. "It kind of breaks my heart when I have women on my show who've been on 50, 100 dates. Something's not right if you have to go out with 100 people."

This comment made me wonder - has Steve Harvey actually tried online dating? Tinder? Most of us have been on at least 50 dates, if not more. I don’t think there’s something wrong with people dating in those numbers, because there are so many opportunities now to meet people.

But I do agree that most daters don’t really invest in getting to know the person sitting in front of them on any given date. There are too many options to be that committal, so they typically move fast. Steve Harvey’s comment rings true when we consider how much time we invest with such little return. I write about this in my book Date Expectations.

Website Delightful aims to change those statistics, with a little help from Harvey. Sam Yagan, CEO of the Match Group, said in a statement, "To take [Steve’s] power and his outlook on relationships and his views on love and combine that with the technology and algorithms that we know to work creates a powerful new category." In other words, the celebrity factor is key in the marketing of the new site.

Others have tried this before. Take the host of The Bachelor Chris Harrison, who last year launched a video-based dating app called At First Sight, hoping to capitalize on his celebrity. It hasn’t quite taken off like Tinder, despite its appealing premise of seeing a short video of potential dates, rather than just viewing photos.

Harvey and Match expect their approach to be different. After all, Harvey is a dating advice coach with his own TV show, and has helped many women find lasting relationships. He is an expert, not just a celebrity.

"We're going to help women get themselves out of the hunting game," Harvey said. "And we're going to make a concerted effort to get men on here who are looking more seriously for a relationship instead of just dating a lot of people."

As for how they will compete with successful marriage-minded sites like eHarmony, Yagan is a little unclear. Instead, he compares Delightful to OkCupid and Tinder, which are known more for their hook-up appeal, saying that at the end of the day when people want relationships, they will look to Delightful instead.

Yep, you read that headline right. And the news comes straight from the mouth of Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid and writer of the OkTrends blog, so you know it's worth paying attention to.

Messages are usually the most private part of an online dating site, but Rudder gets special access and he's used it for another interesting wave of online dating research.

First, he took a look at the history of technology and how it altered the way we communicate. The notable moment came in 2008, when Apple launched the app store and everything went mobile. The effect on OkCupid users' writing was practically instantaneous. Smartphone-using singles started typing on teeny-tiny keyboards, and as a result message length has dropped by over two-thirds in the 6 years since.

These days, the average message is just over 100 characters. It seems like nothing, but users have adapted. Messages that get the highest response rate are now only 40-60 characters long.

Then Rudder examined how much putting time and effort into messages leads to better results. He looked at messages between 150 and 300 characters and plotted them against the time it took to write them. The outcome? Taking time to craft your messages helps, but only to a point. A peak is reached at around the 120-second mark, and after that you're just overthinking it.

There are also those out there who maximize their time by – sigh – cutting and pasting. And there are a lot of them. All told, 20% of the sample registered 5 or fewer keystrokes per message. “Sitewide,” writes Rudder, “the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.”

So there you have it. Like it or not, cut/paste is here to stay. It may be a little less effective, but it's far more efficient. Those who choose the CRTL + V strategy are actually just harnessing technology and hacking the online dating process – and doing so is probably making them far more successful than you, person who spends an hour personalizing every message.

RIP faith in humanity, hello more time to spend watching cat videos on YouTube.

Dating app Tinder has had to deal with a lot of security issues, despite the app’s verification system using Facebook Connect.  In theory, because of Facebook’s security measures, only “real people” can join Tinder, so users can sign up with some reassurance the profiles they'll encounter will be real. But lately, this has not been the case.

Spammers and scammers have been able to lure users away from Tinder and onto their sites, typically, with spam bots - fake accounts pretending to be real people that flirt with users in order to redirect them to adult sites - and take their money. In the past, Tinder users could block profiles, but they couldn’t report spam.

According to website Tech Crunch, things have changed. Users can now not only block accounts but also report spam. Tinder also made a technical update to address the issue, and the update was effective at cutting down on the in-app spam. Unfortunately, the spam bots just found another avenue - SMS. Phone spam for Tinder users skyrocketed.

Instead of luring Tinder users away while they are inside the app, the spam bots changed their scripts and started collecting mobile numbers from the users, sending those users text messages with links to the spammers’ websites. 

It can be really misleading for users to receive text messages from spammers who are pretending to be people. One example Tech Crunch used that came from a spam bot read like this: “sorry my phone’s almost dead and out of mins too. If you go on Tinderpages.com ill be there. Im sweetgirl4u on it. Sorry its free tho if you confirm your email.”

Tinder is still racking up complaints, so it seems the technical update hasn’t actually made a difference. According to security researchers, this is beacuse Tinder was successful in getting rid of the in-app spam bots but not the spam bots themselves. Lead researcher Raj Bandyopadhyay explained to how they conducted their research, and what it meant for Tinder:

“Our topic modeler looks for phone number related complaints, and then classifies them using Data Scientist to validate correlation. In this case, we isolated complaints related to Tinder, and then compared them to historical complaints. This gives us a high degree of confidence that the spike is specific to Tinder activity and not just an overall spike in spam. In addition, it is important to re-emphasize that this is a pattern we have frequently seen – fraudsters migrating to phone after being thwarted online.”

So it seems text messages are becoming the spam bot avenue of choice, since online technology has improved so much. Now, mobile security needs to catch up.

After teaching women to Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey is gearing up for a new crusade to “help women become more dateable.”

Anyone else cringing, or is that just me?

It’s not that the man hasn’t had plenty of successful ideas. He’s made it as a comic, a talk show presenter, a game show host, and the author of two relationship advice books, so he must be doing something right. But if that mission statement doesn’t immediately raise a red flag, you’re not reading it correctly.

Here’s the deal: Harvey has launched a dating website, Delightful.com, as a joint venture with IAC (the company that owns Match.com, OkCupid, Tinder, and a slew of niche dating services). In addition to being the face of the site, he will supply articles and videos to help subscribers “find love and keep it.” So far so good.

But then you get to the philosophy behind the site, which Harvey kindly shared with Forbes recently.

“Women are wired differently,” he says. Online dating is great for people who want to go on a lot of dates - which means it’s good for men in Harvey’s mind, because only men are interested in playing the field. “A man doesn’t have any problem at all dating several or a wide variety of people until he finds the right one,” he says.

On the other hand, “women don’t really want to just date,” explains Harvey. “They want to date with the hope that it leads to a relationship.” And the reason is simple: “A lot of women have that biological clock that ticks in them.”

He’s not the first to say so. And undoubtedly, in some cases, he’s right. But it’s also a painfully problematic approach to 21st century dating. Just when you thought we were moving away from ideas that divide the sexes, here comes every “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” cliché that’s been ruining things so far.

Harvey goes on to say that women are too picky when it comes to dating, and that Delightful will include advice columns for women on important topics like “how to become more datable.” For men, Delightful will offer “instructionals on being the kind of man who knows how to treat a woman.” At no point does it appear Delightful will explain that it takes two people to make a relationship work, and that men and women need to learn to meet each other halfway for relationships to survive.

And what does Match CEO Sam Yagan have to say about Harvey’s prehistoric approach to modern romance?

“It’s not like we’re standing behind everything he’s ever said.” Well ok then.

Tinder is no doubt the latest craze of online and mobile dating. Most singles have heard of it, if they aren’t already using it. But despite the fact that Tinder requires you to sign up via your Facebook profile (which keeps out the fake profiles and supposedly keeps people honest about who they are) – hackers are finding ways to game the system for their own benefit.

A recent article by such a hacker appeared in Android Central, where the author Cage Michaels - who is happily in a relationship - enjoys just being on Tinder, flipping through photos and judging each woman's hotness. He has decided to share his strategy with the masses (“FTW” – “for the win” - as he says). To him, Tinder has nothing to do with his relationship and his “real life,” but considers it a game or a way to pass time entertainingly. He says, “I'm in a relationship. I'm happy. I just find it really entertaining to swipe through photos of real people. Some people spend all day looking at photos of cats. Personally, I'd rather look at photos of women. To each their own.”

Of course, in order to look at photos on Tinder you have to be on Tinder. This created a problem for him, because his friends (and her friends) noticed he was on the app and were wondering if he was cheating or had broken up with his girlfriend. According to him, neither was the case. Hence his dilemma – how could he Tinder without all the hassle?

Instead of setting up a fake Facebook profile (which can take some effort), he decided to outsmart Tinder’s GPS capabilities and fake the app into thinking he was visiting another city (where he had no friends or connections). This made his Tinder habit easy to maintain.

He goes step-by-step in the article, guiding people first through downloading a fake GPS app. Once you download, you can pick the city where you want to anonymously browse Tinder profiles. When you hit the “play” button within the fake GPS, you can then enable a fake GPS signal. Once you open Tinder, it will pick up the fake GPS location from your phone and use that for its search.

While this is one way of creating a fake profile on Tinder, it certainly isn’t the only way to outsmart the app. There are new apps being launched that take advantage of Tinder’s functionality by allowing people to match en masse without even looking at profiles, just to increase your odds of success.

Between these and the hackers, you might want to question whether your Tinder match is real, or just another person who’s gaming the system.