Dating Services

If you want to put your best foot forward and drum up the most interest from potential partners, you won't be surprised to learn that it all comes down to your profile photo.

Okay, not all of it. Some people do actually read the words you painstakingly chose. But let's be real: the profile pic is the first thing someone sees, and it has a lot to do with how well you sell yourself online.

Before you start contemplating plastic surgery, remember that the perfect profile picture isn't about conventional beauty. There are plenty of other factors that go into a photo that catches eyes, and none of them have to do with how well you apply eyeliner or how much time you spend in the gym.

Zoosk conducted a study of 4,000 online daters and discovered some of the more unexpected elements that attract attention online:

• Yes, your pet is cute, but your furry friend is not helping you find a date. Photos with animals lower the average number of messages received by 53% for both men and women.
• Posing with human friends also lowers your average – by 42%.
• Women get a 60% boost in messages received if their profile picture is taken indoors.
• On the other hand, men get 19% more messages if their photo is taken outdoors.
• A full body shot is must, regardless of your gender. It'll give you a 203% bump in your incoming messages average.
• Ladies: your selfies earn you 4% more messages. Gentlemen: sorry, your selfies lower your incoming average by 8%.

What you're seeing here are some similarities, but also a couple of key differences. Take that last one: why is it we think it's normal for women to take selfies, but think it's vain for men to do the same thing? Shocker – we have double standards were beauty and gender norms are concerned.

Those double standards continue into the text of the profile. Zoosk's research came to the unsettling conclusion that honesty is the best policy for men, but that women should keep their mouths shut about the big issues until later on. Looking at the data, Zoosk found that:

• The words "separate" and "divorce" up men's incoming messages by 52%. Mentioning children means another 7% boost.
• For women, on the other hand, mentioning the same words causes the incoming messages average to drop by 7%.

So what does that mean? Does that mean women should hide their pasts while men should celebrate them? Does it mean that online dating is fundamentally broken?

What it really means, more than anything, is that online dating sites serve as a microcosm of society as a whole. Regardless of gender, double standards are firmly in place – and we'll never beat them online until we beat them offline.

For more on the dating site that commissioned the study you can read our review of Zoosk.

Tinder has become incredibly popular in the last couple of years, thanks to its game-like format of swiping left and right, and to its easy set-up. There’s no time-consuming process of writing a profile and anguishing over what to say in your messages. You cut to the chase: yes or no.

But now, people are looking for easier ways to date than even Tinder can provide. For those daters, there’s a new app for that called Tinderoid, short for Tinder on Steroids.

This app is mainly catering to the male Tinder users and online daters, especially ones who feel they aren’t getting enough matches. With online dating, guys send out mass emails when they aren't getting responses, hoping someone will email back. It increases the odds, at least. With Tinder, guys are adopting the strategy of saying “yes” to every match, and are just swiping right without even looking at photos. They figure if they swipe right to as many candidates as possible, their chances of getting dates (or getting laid) increases significantly.

But all that swiping right can apparently be tiring.

Tinderoid adds features to Tinder that its creators think are missing, one of them being the ability for a user to like everyone in their area. Tinderoid founder Mike (he provides no last name) tells website TechVibes that a user can like as many as 10,000 potential matches in a few seconds.

Then you can skip all that swiping and order a beer, waiting for matches to roll in.

This isn’t the only new feature Tinderoid added. The app also allows users to search for potential matches using keywords, and view multiple results at the same time. So instead of looking at people one by one, you can select a bunch at a time, and again – see who bites.

And while Tinder doesn’t have an iPad app, Tinderoid offers support for the tablet’s larger screen.

According to Mike, the app is currently available for iOS and has been downloaded over 100,000 times. It has over 5,000 five-star reviews on the iTunes store, I’m guessing from its male user base.

Will this be helpful to daters in the long run? Maybe for some guys, but not for most daters. Women tend to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of matches and messages they can get when they are online dating, get frustrated, and stop using the service, and it’s no different with Tinder. Women are still more likely to swipe left, mostly because of tactics like this, where guys tend to always say yes, even if they might not be all that attracted or interested in a particular woman. They are just seeing who they can get.

Tinderoid is only available on iTunes, but the company is working on an Android version. It is free to download, but if you want all ads removed it costs $2.99.

If you were a fan of the OkTrends blog – and let’s be real, who wasn’t? – your day is about to get a little better. Though the brilliant blog is no more, its writer, Christian Rudder, has plenty more to say on the subject of the human side of Big Data. He has just released a new book that explores who we are in a world in which we make an increasing amount of data about ourselves available online.

The book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Sites like OkCupid collect vast amounts of information on their users in order to provide better service, and in doing so raise some interesting questions. Rudder believes the info isn’t just useful for the websites – he also believes it may change the way we see ourselves.

That being said, he readily admits that data isn’t everything. "Look,” he told NPR's Arun Rath, “there's no way OkCupid, Facebook, Twitter, these sites even added all together can stand in for the entirety of the human condition. People do all kinds of things they don't do online." But it would be silly to let all that data go to waste, wouldn’t it?

Rudder has examined everything from age, to race, to gender, to language, to attraction. His findings are consistently fascinating for both data geeks and non-data geeks alike, such as:

• There is a strong bias against African American users on online dating sites. They are rated lower, receive fewer messages, and are less often replied to than people of other races. Online daters of both genders tend to prefer to date within their own racial or ethnic group.
• Contrary to popular belief, women don’t prefer older men. Until women reach the age of 40, they are more interested in men in their age range. On the other hand, men across the board show a preference for younger women. 20-year-old female users were reliably rated highest by men of all ages.

As fascinating as Rudder’s analysis is, it has its limitations. There are potential hazards to taking consumer data collected for a specific purpose and using it to extract meaning about something else. Data also isn’t necessarily indicative of behavior. In the case of OkCupid’s users, it may measure opinions but not actual actions. Still, Rudder firmly believes collecting this kind of information is worthwhile.

“I definitely think it's good,” he told NPR. “When you put all this stuff together, you're able to look at people in a way that people have never been able to look at people before. ... You have millions and millions of people living their lives through an interface that records what they're doing as they live. ... It's the beginning of, I think, a revolution in how social science and behavioral science are done.”

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.