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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.

For the single women reading, how many lewd messages have you received on OkCupid in the past month? How many guys have stalked you over Tinder? If you answer “too many” for either one, you might be ready for a new kind of dating app called Siren.

Siren is an alternative to the typical dating apps like Tinder, where many men swipe right to have more women in their cue - meaning, they play the numbers. They make the first move, often approaching women in a way that makes them feel pressured, uncomfortable, or just plain creeped out. It’s become a kind of risky game for some women, where they aren’t sure if they will meet someone and feel safe. If they don’t, the whole dating app experience becomes tainted.

Yes, you read that correctly. When you friends ask how you met the love of your life, your answer could begin with “Well, I spit in a tube, and…”

It’s probably not the romantic origin story you were expecting, but it’s certainly one of the most high tech. SingldOut.com claims to be the first online dating site to make matches based on your DNA (I don't think it is as the now defunct Scientific Match tried DNA matching back in 2008). The site is partnered with Instant Chemistry, a service that uses psychology and DNA testing to determine "biological compatibility" in a long-term relationship. Here’s how it works:

• Sign up for a SingldOut membership
• Get an Instant Chemistry DNA kit in the mail
• Spit into the enclosed tube
• Pack it up in the included prepaid envelope, then ship it back to Instant Chemistry
• Take a psychological assessment online
• Receive your results, which are posted to your online dating profile, a week later

Instant Chemstiry tests two "markers" in order to determine compatibility. The first is the serotonin uptake transporter, which is involved in how people react to positive and negative emotions. The second are the genes influencing your immune system.

Research shows there is a strong correlation between people in long-term relationships having different (but complementary) versions of the serotonin and immune system genes, but the science is still in its infancy. SingldOut is “looking at a very small number of genes, and you simply cannot extrapolate a prediction from those genes to long-term compatibility," says Mike Dougherty, director of education for the American Society of Human Genetics. It’s impossible to ignore the other genes and environmental factors that come into play during the complex process of attraction.

These days DNA seems to be the pinnacle of science. There are diets designed around your DNA. Crimes are solved via DNA. You can screen for diseases using your DNA. You can learn about your ancestors by your DNA. It’s no surprise that a company is now attempting to bring dating by DNA to the masses, though even they point out that it’s a stretch to consider DNA a top factor in the choice of a partner.

Is it a conceptually interesting prospect? Yes. Is it effective? Perhaps, when used in conjunction with more traditional methods. Is it deterministic? Absolutely not. Not yet anyway , but aren’t you a least a little bit intrigued at the idea of living in a sci-fi future in which we can be matched with perfect partners based on our biology?

Membership to SingldOut is priced at $199 for three months, $249 for six months or $299 for 12 months. 

When it comes to mobile dating, every company has just one goal right now: beat Tinder. The latest app to attempt the feat is Happn, a new mobile dating service from Fabien Cohen, Didier Rappaport, and Antony Cohen.

Like most mobile dating apps, Happn uses your phone's location to show you potential matches. Every time you cross someone's path, that person’s profile is added to the top of your feed. It works much like the app Highlight, but for your love life. The goal is to save the world from missed connections, augment coincidence, and boost luck. That cutie you keep running into in your local coffee shop but never say hi to? Happn is where you connect.

When you open the app, you're presented with the grid view of all your latest encounters. Scroll down if you want to go further back in time. Tap a profile to access all the normal features you expect from a dating app. Indicate that you like someone in order to discover if there is mutual interest, then begin a conversation. Note that, unlike Tinder, users can chat with anyone using credits, even if there is no match.

“The app tells you the story of your life through your movements,” co-founder, CEO, and former Dailymotion COO Didier Rappaport told TechCrunch. “The newsfeed personalization is really important. It’s based on real life and this is key. It could be people you’ve crossed paths with and that you really wanted to see on Happn, it could also be someone you came across 44 times because you live in the same area.”

The company is still relatively small, but last year French VC firm Alven Capital invested a significant amount of money in a seed round. Happn is now available in three countries and is gaining traction. Since its official launch in March 2014, around 200,000 people have installed the app. Happn has 40,000 daily active users in Paris, 10,000 daily active users in London, and in Berlin, after only one month, between 7000 and 10,000 daily active users.

The numbers are small compared to the massive competition Happn faces, but they’re strong for a company in such early stages. And now that its user base is building, Happn stands to hit it big. The company plans to launch its app in every major European city over the course of the next eight months, and maybe even in a big city outside Europe.

Once upon a time, back in the 2000s, Hot Or Not was a phenomenon sweeping the Web. By now most of us had written the site off as a piece of early 21^st century nostalgia, but it’s just gotten a mobile makeover and has plans to join the booming online dating business.

The new version of the addictive rating game is owned by UK-based online dating company Badoo, and is now available in the iTunes and Android app stores. Like other mobile dating apps, Hot Or Not uses location-based data to show you the most attractive people in your vicinity. That idea is nothing new. What Hot Or Not hopes will catch users’ eyes is the app’s customized Hot Lists, which are based on how users vote on profiles created in-house of celebrities, politicians, authors, and other recognizable figures.

The Hot Lists feature calculates a person’s hotness based on user votes, then updates in real-time to show the prettiest people near you. The radius the real-time Hot Lists span depends on the number of users active in a given area – so the more users who are around, the more the radius will shrink to keep it localized.

The rest of the app works exactly as you would expect a mobile dating app to work. Users can connect their Hot or Not profiles to Facebook, which autofills their Hot or Not profiles with their Facebook likes and profile pictures. In the games section, users can browse the profiles of other members in their area and rate them with a heart (for “hot”) or an X (for “not”). If a user hits the heart, they can strike up a private conversation with the person who tickles their fancy.

Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev, who launched Badoo in Spain in 2006, is the man behind the plan to bring Hot Or Not back. Badoo is one of the largest international dating sites in the world, with roughly 200 million users in 180 countries, but its presence in the US is lacking. Andreev hopes Hot Or Not will change all that. So far, he claims the new Hot or Not app has amassed 10 million users in its short lifetime.

It’s impossible to prove the validity of Andreev’s claim, but according to the Google Play store, the app has been installed on Android devices between one million and five million times. In the iTunes App Store, shortly after its release, the Hot or Not app ranked 321st overall and 21st in lifestyle.

You can download the app for iPhone, Android, and Windows phones.

The perks of online dating are many, but spend enough time clicking through profiles and you’ll probably find yourself at least a little bit nostalgic for the old days. You can't beat the convenience of an online dating website, but there was something nice about being set up by your friends. It added an extra level of security. You felt comfortable in the knowledge that whoever you were meeting had already been vetted by someone you trust, and therefore probably wasn't a total jerk.

For a long time, that's been one of the biggest barriers online dating has faced. No matter what dating sites do to screen users, it never compares to the recommendation of a close friend.

Until now, that is. Enter MyCuteFriend, a new dating app that asks women to nominate their single guy friends as potential dates for other women. “Where every guy comes recommended” reads the app’s slogan, and that’s precisely what it offers: every guy who appears on MyCuteFriend has been vouched for by an actual, IRL human being.

Created by John Furneaux and Steve Chen, the app was designed specifically to make the online dating experience more pleasant for women – so you will see women nominating men, but never the other way around. After hearing constant complaints about online dating from their female friends, Furneaux and Chen realized that women needed a way to keep the creepy out. They enlisted a mostly female design team to create the functionality and user interface, and MyCuteFriend was born.

To use the app, women select a number of hashtags (which cover everything from body to brain) to describe their eligible friends. Photos are then pulled from the men’s Facebook profiles. Once a guy has been nominated, he receives a notification and must accept it and download the app before his profile becomes active. Women can nominate any man they are friends with on Facebook.

On the other side of things, women can browse the hashtags and photos, responding with a simple “Yes” or “No, thanks.” There are no long, boring questionnaires and no anonymous creepy stalkers. Women can only receive messages from guys they have said “Yes” to.

For even more customization, short video clips can be recorded and included in the profiles. Basically it's like the love child between Tinder and Vine, with a little bit of Facebook thrown in. So far the app has only launched in San Francisco, but will no doubt expand to other cities if it proves to be successful.