Dating Services

Ever wanted to be set up by a friend? Or have you been introduced to a potential date over Facebook by a mutual Facebook friend? If you prefer meeting dates through friends rather than strangers, you might be interested to know there’s now an app for making these types of introductions.

This idea isn’t a new one. Jess Meet Ken is an online dating service that allows you to set up your single guy friends by recommending them to your Facebook friends. Hinge and CoffeeMeetsBagel are both matchmaking apps that introduce you to potential dates via your circle of friends on Facebook. Even Tinder got into the matchmaking game over a year ago with its service Matchmaker, which allowed its users to introduce their Facebook friends to each other. Tinder has since phased out this feature.

But Mashr insists it is doing things a little differently and will be successful, because unlike Tinder, it is making matchmaking the core of its user experience.

Mashr is pretty straightforward. One user pairs two of her friends together, offering an explanation on why they should meet. If both of them agree, Mashr makes the connection, much like Tinder.

Although this can get embarrassing for the matchmaker. If one friend passes, the other friend knows it, and what if they happen to run into each other in real life, since they are in circles of mutual friends? It could get a little murky, as with any friendship-based set-ups.

It could be argued that this is a model that works in the real world in an organic way, so over an app, it just increases your chances to meet a good (and vetted) match. Mashr Co-Founder Brian Nichols told Tech Crunch in a recent interview, “I know Tinder is all the rage these days, but does it really make sense to meet with a complete stranger? Wouldn’t it make sense (and be safer) if you were connected by a friend to your future significant other?”

Nichols maintains that people are more likely to say “yes” to a date if their friends are recommending them, rather than easily rejecting a stranger after looking at a couple of pictures over Tinder.

“People are on Tinder for themselves, to play the game of Tinder,” Nichols tells Tech Crunch.

But Mashr is also making a bit of a game out of its app with MashPlay, which is a timed game where you try to match as many of your friends together as quickly as possible. MashFeed shows all the matches people are making, not just the ones that say “yes” to each other, which seems a little TMI for users.

Hinge, CoffeeMeetsBagel, and JessMeetKen are all matchmaking-based apps competing for the same users. We’ll see how Mashr stacks up.

A recent report of Tinder’s financial worth shows that its users aren’t going away anytime soon. The massively popular dating app is poised to increase its value and market share further over the next year. According to Market Watch, Tinder is growing at such a rate that Barclays predicts its valuation will reach $1.1 billion by the end of 2015, adding to IAC’s current $5.68 billion market cap. IAC owns many of the most popular dating sites, including Match.com.

What makes its value so high, considering the app is free for download? The answer is in the sheer number of users who download the app. As with most online dating sites, perception is key: the more users a site has, the more people will gravitate to it because they think their chances of getting a date, relationship or even hook-up increase.

Tinder’s popularity has taken off thanks to younger daters who embraced the mobile technology and liken Tinder to a game that is easy and fun to use. Plus, it has taken the stigma that is part of online dating away, because the app is mainly to support single people meeting each other casually as opposed to those looking to find serious relationships.

Tinder’s popularity is not just PR buzz. Its growth in the past year has been explosive, with 750 million swipes per day reported in February of 2014, up from 5 million in December of 2013. Today, it manages more than a billion swipes per day (resulting in 12 million matches each day). According to Market Watch, Barclays expects Tinder global daily active users to reach 20 million by April, or 40 million on a monthly active user basis. It also expects Tinder to generate as much as $180 million in revenue in 2015.

How Tinder will get this kind of revenue is unclear. Lately though, they have been floating a few ideas, including a “freemium” service where basic use of the app is still free but restrictions are in place that can be lifted for a fee - like the number of matches you get, or how many photos you see, or the ability to communicate. The founders don’t want to advertise on the app, but they are open to partnerships that would generate revenue from “real world behavior,” though they don’t define what that looks like. They are also focused on the age of Tinder users, and how they might evolve in their dating preferences as they get older. Right now, Tinder is mostly a product that young people use, especially teens and young twenty-somethings - those who might later graduate to a more serious pay service like Match.com.

Eyeballs are currency however, at least to investors, who see Tinder as a golden opportunity. For more on this dating app you can read our review of Tinder.

Ever wanted to get inside the minds of thousands of daters to see what makes everyone tick? Maybe that seems cool, or maybe you’d rather sit in a dentist’s chair for five hours, but either way – it does make you curious.

So it’s no surprise that OkCupid Co-Founder Christian Rudder has decided to harness the power of OkCupid’s user data and create a book that piques our curiosity. After all, we all watched with fascination as the dating site’s blog OkTrends revealed its latest research, informing us of what types of people we are attracted to, we’re doing wrong in our online dating profiles, or how to effectively message other users. Rudder found interesting trends in the details, helping us ask questions we didn’t even know to ask. For instance, why does the angle of the camera matter in a photo, or how you smile? Why is it preferable to write a less descriptive profile? Why is it more attractive to have a guitar in your hand than a tennis racket, or possess an unusually-shaped nose than to be considered average-looking? Or the million-dollar question: what do people lie about the most when they are online dating?

OkCupid has given us the sometimes surprising preferences of online daters, based on all of the data they mine from their thousands of users. Because of the site’s format of creative questions and answers, it’s allowed them to dig deeper than most.

OkTrends has been on hiatus since 2011, when Rudder started taking the information to compile it into a book, rather than just posting the information for free on their website. Rudder’s new book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), which comes out on Sept. 9 and examines interactions for insights into whom and how we date.

For one of Dataclysm’s studies, Rudder analyzed how men and women approach attraction. It turns out that as women get older, they like older men. Men, on the other hand, consistently prefer younger and younger women. Men will message women close to their own age, but only up to a point. For example, men in their mid-40s rarely talk to women older than 30. “We have a lot of serial daters on the site—men who just keep dating women 10 years younger than they are,” Rudder told Business Week in a recent interview. “Eventually their tactics start to fail, and the young ladies they’re messaging begin rejecting them. The result is a lot of 40-year-old men and women who find it hard to get a date.”

OkCupid isn’t worried about user backlash for mining their personal data. Rudder recently wrote a post to address this issue, pointing out that all websites experiment on users, admitting that OkCupid once tested its matchmaking algorithm by telling users who were not suited for each other that they were a near-perfect match. “We got maybe five complaints,” Rudder told Business Week.

Since OkCupid users don’t pay for the site or its advice, does Rudder have an audience willing to buy his book? We’ll have to wait and see.

Check out our review of OkCupid for more information on this popular dating site.

Some users have reported due to Tinder being down on Wednesday that they have lost all of their matches. According to The Wire and their communication with Tinder's VP of Communications, Rosette Pambakian, the Lost Matches bug has now been fixed.

No matches have been deleted and all you need to do to get your Tinder matches back is to log out of the dating app and then log back into it again.

We also learned that the reason why there was a Tinder outage on Wednesday was because Facebook went down. Tinder relies on Facebook to retrieve the user information for their members. If the Facebook service is not accessible then Tinder will not work either.

There are a few common complaints every online dater has, and at the top of the list is "They looked nothing like their picture.” You could call it superficial, but let's be honest – who doesn’t appreciate truth in advertising?

There's always an embellishment aspect to dating, especially when dating means filling out a profile and answering personality tests, but there's a point when embellishment becomes flat-out lying. And that’s not cool, folks.

There’s never going to be a way to ensure that everything said on an online dating profile is fact, but a new feature from Zoosk will at least ensure that the photos associated with the profile are real. The new feature is called Photo Verification, and it uses a patent-pending process to compare members’ photos to videos they submit of themselves.

The verification service is currently available only on iOS, but an Android version is in the works. To use it, open the Zoosk app on your iPhone and select a profile photo that you want verified. You will be prompted to record and submit a video selfie that captures your face from multiple angles. Zoosk will then compare the video to the photo to ensure it’s an accurate representation of your real life appearance. If you pass the test, you will be certified with a badge on your profile. It’s basically the dating equivalent of Twitter’s verified profiles for celebrities, except you don’t have to have a famous face to use it.

Note: the video will remain private, so don’t worry about how much more awkward it is to take a video selfie than a photo selfie.

“One of the most important concerns of online daters is going out with someone who doesn’t really resemble their profile picture,” says Shayan Zadeh, co-founder and CEO of Zoosk. “By innovating a system for our members to validate the accuracy of existing profile photos, we believe we can create better first-date experiences that will lead to lasting relationships.”

By adding a new layer of transparency to online dating, Zoosk hopes to create a more authentic experience that will boost trust between daters and increase first date satisfaction. "Zoosk developed this feature in order to address its members' interest in having more transparency and trust in their potential dates," the company said in a statement. "By creating a Photo Verification process, Zoosk has become the first company in the online dating industry to directly address this concern."

To find out more about this dating service and the other features they offer you can read our review of Zoosk.

The end of August marked a very special milestone for eHarmony: the website’s 14^th birthday.

All those years ago online dating was still a young industry, and founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren (yep, the guy from the commercials) revolutionized it with his research-based approach to matching people for marriage. eHarmony famously created algorithms based on 29 Dimensions of Compatibility scientifically proven to predict successful long-term relationships. Fourteen years later, those algorithms are still going strong.

Since its inception, eHarmony has racked up more than 45 million subscribers – meaning approximately 1 out of every 7 people in America has subscribed to eHarmony at one point or another. The site is responsible for more than 600,000 marriages in its lifetime. On average, 438 people marry every day in the U.S. after being matched by eHarmony (that’s nearly 4% of all new marriages in the country!).

eHarmony has seen many major changes in the last 2 years, when Warren returned as CEO after previously leaving the company. Amongst the milestones are:

• The launch of eH+, a premium matchmaking service
• A cross-platform redesign of the website
• Record numbers of subscribers and mobile users
• New levels of profitability

“We are so proud of what we have achieved at eHarmony,” said Dr. Warren. “Our success in online dating underscores an opportunity to impact areas beyond online dating. We are launching new verticals in the coming months and years that broaden our reach--verticals that will build eHarmony into a relationship site. Soon, eHarmony will influence the way we look at finding a job, finding friends and solving loneliness.”

As it enters the next phase of its teens, eHarmony has big things in the works. Chief among them is Elevated Careers, a service to match employers with prospective employees and help people find their ideal jobs.  After 3 years of research, eHarmony hopes Elevated Careers will help users find fulfilling, meaningful jobs that last longer than the national average of 4.6 years.

When asked how eHarmony plans to make it work, Warren told Business Insider “The first thing we do when getting involved with a company is we want a short inventory filled out by every person in the company. Just asking how they perceive the culture of the company. We want that culture to be matched up with the culture of the person who’s the applicant.”

“The second thing we do,” he continued, “is we want the org chart of the company, so that if an individual wants to work in a particular part of the company, we want to know what skills are required of the applicant.”

And finally, he added, “we want to know whether the personality match of the applicant and the person they’re going to report to is a good fit for the company and individual. If we can get the culture, skillset, and personality right, we’re convinced that the typical 4.6 year average duration at a company in America, we’ll be able to take that way up.”

For more on this dating site and to find out why it has been such a popular online dating service you can read our review of eHarmony.