Dating Services

Are you passionate and romantic? Or do you consider yourself more rational and perceptive?

A new study came out from statistician, researcher and computational biologist Emma Pierson, who dug into some eHarmony-released data to produce some interesting findings. Apparently, the adjectives you use to describe yourself on the eHarmony site influences who you are matched with.

The study pointed out that many people tend to use the same adjectives together to describe themselves. For instance, if you call yourself passionate likely you also use the term romantic. If you describe yourself as intelligent you probably would agree that you’re also rational or perceptive.

Based on these adjective groupings, Pierson found that there are five basic types of eHarmony daters: The Romeos (passionate), the Spocks (intelligent, rational), the Snow Whites (sweet, quiet), the Teddy Roosevelts (optimistic and energetic), and the Hufflepuffs (hard working and loyal).

According to the study, most people will identify with one of these groups more than the others, and tend to use adjectives that describe them together – such as dependable and hard-working. This matters to eHarmony because it also determines who to match you with based on these adjectives.

The most striking observation from the data she collected: women tend to be matched with men who are in the same grouping – in other words, Teddy Roosevelts tend to go for other Teddy Roosevelts. There are two exceptions however: Spock women seem to have a thing for Romeo men (opposites attract?), and Hufflepuff women get matched up with Snow White men.

For the men, it lines up pretty closely as well. Though the majority of male members get matched up with women in their same category, Romeo men pair up with Spock women fairly often too. (Good to know that a passionate man likes a smart woman – maybe she keeps him reigned in?) Also, Snow White men tend to go for the loyal, dependable Hufflepuff women.

Where do you fall on the chart? Are you the rational dater, who carefully examines all the evidence before deciding whether or not to fall in love? Or are you easy-going and optimistic, assuming that when you meet the right person, things will work out, so you don’t sweat the small stuff?

There’s some truth to matching based on how you see yourself, because eHarmony claims that their members have longer lasting marriages and relationships than those who met on other dating sites. Mostly, it’s interesting to see that in the end, similar and complementary feelings, approaches and personality traits do tend to attract each other.

The results are in from Match.com and their annual Singles in America survey, and it seems that people are still looking for happily ever after when it comes to relationships.

Match.com surveyed over 5,000 singles to find out what they think about dating, love, sex and relationships today. The biggest find? Technology is changing how we meet each other and also how we date. The majority of singles met their last date online (31%) rather than through a friend (only 25%). Also, 29% of singles use video chat to communicate with a date. It turns out they want to see if there is a little virtual chemistry before they agree to meet in person.

It's no surprise however that women are pickier daters than men. The study found that the majority of men will date a woman who is more successful and makes more money than they do, or is more educated. However, the majority of women won't date a man who is less intellectual or shorter than they are.

What about turn-offs? Most singles judge their dates by how confident they are and by their teeth. It's also a turn-off if a potential date has bad grammar or uses text speak when sending an email. Most daters prefer someone who comes across as more educated.

A bit of advice for men: no sexy selfies! This is the number one turn-off for women. And for the guys? Don't text so often, ladies. If he doesn't respond, avoid sending two or three more texts to get his attention. This is the number one turn-off for guys.

Social media is another sticking point as far as turn-offs go. Avoid airing your dirty laundry and venting over Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms. It is the number one social media turn-off for both sexes!

Another big take-away from the study: be kind and respectful. One hundred percent of women and 98% of men value being treated with respect in a relationship and make it their number one priority. In addition, a whopping 97% of singles are turned off when a date is rude to the waitstaff at a restaurant and 96% are turned off by bad table manners. So mind your manners!

The best news? People are still romantics. Eighty-nine percent of singles surveyed agree that you can live happily ever after with a partner. And despite how much people seem to be hooking up, and the majority of singles are looking for commitment and want to get married.

For more information on the service that brought us this study you can read our review of Match.com.

File this one under “Not a surprise.” IAC/InterActiveCorp – owner of Match, OkCupid, Tinder, and more – has released its fourth quarter 2013 financial results, and things are looking good almost all the way across the bar.

IAC’s performance was strong in Q4 2013. Match closed up the year well with 12% revenue growth and 21% OIBA (Operating Income Before Amortization) growth in the fourth quarter. Total revenue for Q4 2013 was $203.9M, up from $182.6M in Q4 2012. For the year, Match grew revenue 10.5% and OIBA 16%, and the company predicts an even better year of growth in 2014.

After pulling out of European markets to focus on the United States in 2009, Match has managed to successfully grow in the US as well as across the globe. The company doesn’t hesitate to call itself “the unquestioned global leader in dating,” with 30 million active users and 3.4 million paying subscribers in 2013.

Core, Meetic and Developing revenues grew 4%, 8% and 69%, respectively, to $115.7 million, $58.9 million and $29.4 million. That growth was driven by an increase in subscribers and as well as the contribution of mobile app Twoo, which was not in the prior year period. On the whole, profits increased due to higher revenue and lower customer acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue.

The most interesting source of IAC’s potential growth is Tinder, the rapidly growing social dating app primarily owned by IAC. Tinder clocked in at 100M daily profile views in August 2013, and is expected to hit 1B daily profile views in April. That’s some serious swiping. Although Tinder's implied valuation today is low, it could prove to be worth more than IAC's current market cap of $6.4B.

Even for IAC’s traditional dating sites, mobile has been big. 50% of all communication for Match.com US is sent from mobile devices. At OkCupid, the number rises to over 60%. Those numbers were single digits as recently as 2010, and IAC says it has just barely scratched the surface where optimization for geo-specific features and mobile markets are concerned.

2014 promises to be full of mobile product enhancements across the board, so IAC expects to see even greater engagement and customer acquisition resulting from smartphones. These are the kind of changes that allow IAC’s portfolio to continuously thrive, despite the changing world around it. The future looks predictably bright for the company.

It looks like yesterday morning Plenty of Fish and its sister site eVow was down for about 4 hours. POF.com went down sometime after 6am and was revived around 11:30am. Visitors at our forum and elsewhere on the internet reported receiving a "500 - Internal server error" when they visited the site. The dating app was also reported not working during this time period.

A 500 error code is a catch all error message that web servers reports when something has gone wrong and the server is not sure what it is. It is not a problem with the visitors browser or DNS but an issue with the web server where the web site is hosted.

POF has not reported why the outage has happened. From previous experiences we do not expect an answer.

The last major outage that spanned more than 2 hours in which we know of for Plenty of Fish was in Aug of 2010 (see Story). 2010 wasn't a very good year for POF.com in terms of uptime as they experienced 3 major outages.

Bad news for Tinder fans: all those creepy people you've been avoiding on the app may now know exactly where you are.

It turns out the dating app suffered from a bug for most of last year that would've allowed hackers to determine the exact location of its users. And Tinder chose to cover it up until just a few weeks ago. The information security firm Include Security exposed the security vulnerability in mid-February, saying that anyone with the right kind of knowledge could "get the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for any Tinder user" provided that the app was running.

Hello, major privacy violation!

The company confirmed that "anyone with rudimentary programming skills could query the Tinder API directly and pull down the coordinates of any user." From that API data, it is then possible to triangulate the exact location of the user with a very high degree of accuracy. We're talking within 100 feet. And remember that part where they said "rudimentary programming skills?" So not only can creeps get incredibly close to you, they don't even have to be smart creeps in order to do it.

So much for the fun of all that mindless swiping.

It’s a bad bug, for sure, but before you go cursing the day Tinder hit the app-mosphere, Include Security also noted in an FAQ on its disclosure blog post that these flaws can be "common place in the mobile app space" and will “continue to remain common if developers don't handle location information more sensitively." Is that more comforting or less comforting? I'm not actually sure…

What I am sure of is that Tinder should not have failed to disclose the vulnerability when it was privately reported. Users deserved to know that the security of their location data was potentially compromised, even though the bug was fixed sometime between December and January.

Your questions now are probably "Has anyone actually exploited this?” and “Can I tell if someone has tracked me using this privacy vulnerability?" According to Include Security’s post, “there is no simple way to determine if this attack was used against a specific Tinder user." In other words, nope – you have no way of knowing if that slightly unbalanced-looking person you just rejected is about to come knocking at your door.

Good luck sleeping (or swiping) with that on your mind.

See a demo of the Tinder vulnerability at work:

File this one under “Cool Or Creepy?”

It’s no surprise that Facebook gathers a lot of data about its users, but what is surprising is the conclusions the site can draw by interpreting that information. Of course Facebook knows when you’re “Single,” when you’re “In A Relationship,” or when “It’s Complicated,” but it turns out the social networking site actually knows a whole lot more than that about your love life.

Facebook data scientist Mike Develin works on the site’s search function, studying how people use it, what they’re searching for that isn't available, and how to make it more useful. Along the way, Develin and his team noticed some intriguing romance-related patterns.

It starts with a period of courtship. On Facebook, ‘courtship’ means messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, and posts are shared on each other's timelines. During the 100 days before the relationship starts, there is a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple. The peak is reached 12 days before the relationship begin, at 1.67 posts per day

At “Day 0,” when the relationship officially begins, a couple’s Facebook interactions start to decline. Presumably because they are now spending more time together in person, the happy couple feels less need to communicate online. The lowest point is 1.53 posts per day, reached 85 days into the relationship. Along with that decrease in Facebook interactions comes good news about the content: the interactions may be fewer, but they also get sweeter and more positive. Warm fuzzy feelings are dramatically on the upswing after Day 0.

On the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy side is the breakup data. The research team also took a look at couples who split up and got back together, and documented the saga on their profiles. The maximum, Develin reports to USA Today, was a couple who went in and out of a relationship 27 times in one year. Yikes. It’s a good thing Facebook also found an increase in private messages, timeline posts, and comments from supportive friends during tough times.

What all this means is that horoscopes won’t accurately predict lasting love any time soon, but Facebook might. "We have such a wide-ranging set of data, including on places there may not be data on otherwise," Develin told USA Today. And because Facebook knows so much about its users’ authentic identity, there is very little territory its researchers couldn’t explore. The patterns they identify could be instrumental in mapping human interactions and proving or disproving theories about relationships. 

For more on how to use this social network to find dates you should read our Facebook review.