Reviews

The most successful dating apps are based on visuals, and typically pull your photos from Facebook to create your dating “profile.” This allows potential dates to swipe left and right, rejecting or showing interest – depending almost entirely on the photos you have posted.

Now dating app Glimpse takes things one step further. Acknowledging the power of visuals, the new app uses your Instagram account to help you find matches. That is, Glimpse reveals photos you have taken on Instagram to potential matches, so they can get an idea of your interests, who you are, and what you like.

Instagram seems like a natural fit for online dating, but Glimpse is not the first to make a dating app using visual social media platforms. Take dating app Dreamcliq, launched a couple of years ago to little fanfare, which allows you to create a “vision board” of your interests to attract potential dates - matching according to photo-based profiles. The company marketed the app as being inspired by Pinterest.

There are some challenges with Glimpse. First, if your Instagram is full of selfies, it might be a turn-off for your dates. There are only so many duck faces potential mates can handle. Same thing if you like taking pictures of your food, or your puppy, or even your hiking landscapes – a few artful photographs are great, but sometimes it's too much. Also, what does an extensive photo collection tell you about the person taking the photo, other than they like their dogs, hikes, or crème brulee?

Unlike apps like Tinder, Glimpse doesn’t match based on location, but rather through your hashtags, events, locations and other similarities on Instagram. So, let’s say you include #sunsets or #foodporn tags in a few photos – you’ll be matched with singles in your area who used the same trending phrases. Or, you could be matched with someone you met last month at a party during your work conference. In other words, there seems to be a little more flexibility as well as common interests than a typical dating app. Plus, it gives you a starting point for conversation – something that is missing with Tinder.

Another advantage of Glimpse is that you can advertise yourself through visuals – but instead of worrying about how great your hair looks or whether or not you look big in a certain dress, the app lets you tell a story of who you are through your photos.

Glimpse launched in February and is available on iTunes, but by invitation only.

For those who have been following the trajectory of the phenomenal success of dating app Tinder, for the founders of the app, it wasn’t such a successful match.

Whitney Wolfe was one of the founders of Tinder along with Justin Mateen and Sean Rad, who were the face of the company  as it launched to great success. Then Wolfe and Mateen became romantically involved and when that ended, so did their professional relationship – through reports of abusive behavior and a lawsuit that ended in a $1 million settlement for Wolfe.

The young entrepreneur wants to put all that behind her however. In a recent interview with Business Insider Australia, she addressed the lawsuit, her critics, and the launch of her new dating app Bumble.

Wolfe claims she has moved on, but her history with Tinder is still a bit convoluted. According to Wolfe, she came up with the name and first shepherded the dating app herself by reaching out to students on college campuses, urging them to try it. However, Mateen and Rad have stated that Mateen was the one who brought Tinder to potential users, mainly through the fraternities and his contacts with large social networks at college campuses.

The fight between Mateen and Wolfe got nasty, with text messages back and forth that were exposed in the media. From an outsider’s perspective, neither one of them looked innocent, but in the end, it was a case of he said she said.

Wolfe took her experience at Tinder and decided to try her hand in launching her own female-friendly dating app called Bumble. Although it has the same user-friendly photo-based structure and ease of Tinder, Bumble encourages women to make the first move by giving them 24 hours to reach out to a match before he disappears. (The guys have to sit back and wait for the women to message them.)

Other female-friendly dating apps have come before Bumble with their own spin – like LuLu, which allows women to rate their dates and discuss them with other women on the app. There’s also JessMeetKen, which allows women to promote one of their single guy friends to other women on the site, in order to give them a little endorsement for potential dates. But Bumble is showing promise too, with Wolfe reaching out to college students and encouraging them to give it a try.

“We’re definitely not trying to be sexist, that’s not the goal,” Wolfe told Business Insider. “I know guys get sick of making the first move all the time. Why does a girl feel like she should sit and wait around? Why is there this standard that, as a woman, you can get your dream job but you can’t talk to a guy first? Let’s make dating feel more modern.”

According to Wolfe, 60% of matches on Bumble turn into conversations, and in a little over a month since the launch, there have been more than 100,000 downloads. 

It was only a matter of time before a Denver-based app developer would take advantage of the city’s new legalized pot industry. High There! - a new dating app specifically for weed lovers, launched this month for Android and will be debuting in the iTunes store soon. In addition to the mile-high city, the app is also available in 23 states that have legalized medical marijuana laws.

High There has been described as “the Tinder of pot smoking,” although instead of matching according to proximity and age preferences, the app asks for your weed preferences, such as vaping or smoking, and what your energy level is when you are imbibing – “low energy couch potato or high energy explorer,” according to a report on Mashable.

The design of the app is similar to Tinder, with photos as the main feature and the ability to accept or reject a match by swiping left or right. Besides how you consume your pot, a few extra questions are added to enhance your profile, including what you are in the mood for – “go out, stay in, or chat?” and your interests (“culture, outdoors”).

CEO Todd Mitchem says he was inspired to create the app after his date called it quits when she found out he smoked pot. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, so he decided he’d rather only date pot smokers – but needed a way to meet them. He wanted to build a community around people who might otherwise feel shunned for their habit. He told Mashable that the app “can also act as a kind of social network for smokers who are seeking recommendations on local dispensaries, to share tips or just make friends with other like-minded folks.”   

High There however is not the first dating app to cater to this particular clientele. My420mate launched last year, and 420Singles has been offering their pot-friendly app for a while as well, though High There seems to be getting a lot more attention in the press.

So far, the reception to High There has been mixed, according to reviews in the app store. The main reason for users’ frustration is that they download the free app and then can’t use it because of the marijuana laws in their particular cities. (If it isn’t available to purchase legally in your town, you can’t use the app.) Many people complain that they do have medical marijuana cards from another city, but can’t use the app because of the legal status in the city where they live.

High There is free and available for Android users, and will soon be available for download from the iTunes store.

Let's talk about the Tinder problem.

On one hand, Tinder has been great for mobile dating. Tons of people are on the app, meaning no one is judging you for using it and your pool of potential dates is huge. On the other hand, there are so many people using it that it's difficult to find the needles in the undateable haystack. It's easy to dismiss the entire app as useless once you've swiped left on enough losers.

A new app called The League is hoping to solve that problem – by admitting only the most successful and ambitious users, and keeping everyone else out. Basically, it's Tinder for elitists, although founder Amanda Bradford prefers to say The League “curates members.”

"The best universities curate students. Employers curate their employees. Work and school are the top places where 20-somethings meet each other. So it makes sense for a dating community," she told Business Insider.

The target user is interesting and motivated, passionate and working towards achieving a dream, a young professional who is looking for something more than a hookup. So far the app skews slightly female. Users tend to be in their late 20s and have advanced degrees. All have successfully passed through The League's are-you-cool-enough algorithm, which Bradford says relies more on LinkedIn than Facebook.

If accepted, users are shown a handful of matches each day. At 5pm, a new batch of matches is available. The League ensures you aren't shown first connections or current co-workers, to minimize the potential for awkward encounters.

Accepted users also receive a “ticket” to give to another single friend. Others are put on a waitlist until they’re deemed worthy of entrance into The League. Admittance doesn't guarantee you a spot forever – if you fail to measure up to The League's exacting standards (by responding poorly and earning a bad “flakiness score,” for example), you will be deemed a “low-quality member” and ousted.

Bradford was initially hoping to raise $750,000 from investors, but interest in the app was so high that it's now raised $2.1 million in seed funding. For now, The League is limited to 4,500 beta users in San Francisco. Since November, the app has been responsible for pairing 20,000 people and 19 successful couples. Bradford is focused on growing her small team and expanding to New York City, where there is already a sizeable wait list.

Following NYC, Bradford hopes to conquer London and work her way through more of the world's most interesting cities. The League currently has no plans to come to America's smaller towns, where it's unlikely to find its hyper motivated, career-focused target market.

No partner? No problem.

There's an app for that, because there is, no joke, an app for everything at this point.

Picture a family get-together. Picture that family asking you invasive questions about your relationship status. Picture awkwardly trying to deflect their questions. Picture inventing a fake significant other just to avoid the interrogation.

Now picture a world where that doesn't have to happen. To alleviate the social pressures single people face, St. Louis business partners Matthew Homann and Kyle Tabor decided to do the hard work for you. They created the Invisible Boyfriend and Invisible Girlfriend apps so you don't have to worry about dreaming up a believable fake date.

The apps promise a faux SO “your family can believe in” and “real-world and social proof that you’re in a relationship - even if you’re not - so you can get back to living life on your own terms.” For $24.99 a month the app offers a personalized partner constructed from a hundred text messages, 10 voicemails and one handwritten note. You'll also get crowd-sourced selfies and a story about how you met your sweetie, plus the opportunity to customize your invisible SO's name, personality, interests, and physical characteristics.

Before you start worrying you'll fall in love with your faux dream person and wind up living the real-life version of Her, Matthew Homann says it's out of the question. “We’re not trying to build something that could fool you,” he told TIME. “Our intention has always been to build something that helps you tell a better story about a relationship you’re not in.”

The apps were inspired by real life events. Nine years after Homann divorced his wife, he found himself feeling frustrated when his mother asked if he was bringing a date to Thanksgiving dinner. "In that moment I realised how great it would be to have an answer for her that didn't require me to actually be dating someone," he writes on the website. He started putting the plan into motion in 2013 and the app went live into public beta this month.

You may be wondering just how unhealthy it is to have an invisible BF or GF. That's definitely one of the stops on the crazy train, isn't it?

Gail Saltz, MD, Health‘s contributing psychology editor, says that isn't the case, as long as you're honest about why you're using the service. If it's all in fun, you have nothing to worry about. It only becomes a problem if you become so lost in the fantasy that you forget to look for real relationships.

It may even be a useful tool, Dr. Saltz adds. “Someone with a lot of social anxiety might practice with something like this as a method of making themselves more comfortable for the real thing.”

There's just one problem: what happens when your parents want to meet the new love of your life?

The latest dating app launch is capturing a lot of buzz - and aimed at marketing to the so-called “dating elite.” If you’re single and successful, The League might be the app for you.

The League has gotten attention because of its latest round of funding. Though founder Amanda Bradford was at first looking to raise half a million according to Time Magazine, she has now received $2.1 million from investors looking for the next Tinder – but without, you know – all the low-brow hook-ups.

The League differentiates itself from its competition by offering exclusivity – you have to be accepted into its network. The acceptance algorithm it uses according to Business Insider “scans the social networks to ensure applicants are in the right age group and that they are career-oriented.” The article goes on to say: “That doesn’t mean they have to be Ivy graduates or work for a big-name firm. But they should have accomplished something in their 20s.”

If you are accepted, you are given a limited number of matches each day at 5:00pm, which The League calls “Happy Hour.” You are also given the ability to refer one friend.

The League isn’t the first app to offer more “quality” matches as opposed to the giant dating pool that is Tinder. Hinge is invitation-only, working from your social media circles and offering a limited number of matches per day, as does Coffee Meets Bagel. The difference is that The League utilizes LinkedIn to find matches, avoiding direct contacts (like your boss) and working with those a little further removed. Some have argued that this blurs the line between business and personal, although eHarmony announced earlier this year they would be offering job-matching services to employers and potential employees.

So far, The League has attracted around 4,500 users from San Francisco. Like Hinge, CEO Branford wants to move slowly, city by city, to build her network in a more thoughtful way. She discovered most couples meet through school or work connections, and she wanted to optimize these already-existing networks (hence using LinkedIn for matching). In fact, she is doing much of the business networking herself by attending parties of tech execs in Silicon Valley and fundraisers in San Francisco. She walks around demonstrating her app and offering bracelets with the app’s logo to attendees.

“It isn’t an app for everybody,” Branford told the New York Times. “We’re trying to hit home that…people do have high standards.”