Communication

Fourplay, a new dating app that lets friends create joint profiles and go on group dates with their matches, has become a hit in the New York dating scene. The app now boasts a waiting list of 9,000 people.

According to The New York Post, the app was created by two friends who were healthcare workers and didn’t have much time to devote to their jobs, friends, and the dating scene, so Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs decided to create a profile together on a dating app and look for matches who were willing to recruit their friends and go out all together on a double date. (Hint: they got a lot of positive responses which led to the idea for the app.)

The way Fourplay works is two friends set up a joint profile and then match with other pairs of daters. When there is a match, the four proceed to a group chat. The idea is to take the pressure and awkward conversation off of first dates, which can often be more stressful than fun, to make it a more engaging, communal experience. If there’s no romantic connection, then at least everyone got to spend time with friends, and maybe make new ones.

Online dating might be heading towards a sea change as VC firms invested about $31 million in 43 rounds of funding towards new dating apps in 2021. 

According to website Crunchbase which studies technology trends, the majority of companies raised angel, pre-seed and seed rounds, which means venture capitalist firms were interested in early-stage developments. (There were only three who received Series-A funding.)

Crunchbase also noted that every ten years there seems to be a shift in consumer preferences when it comes to dating app technology, and it usually follows the larger social app trends. Ten years ago, Instagram was the hot new app and dating apps like Tinder gamified their platforms to put photos front and center, where users could just look and swipe. 

After receiving numerous complaints from their users, dating apps in South Korea are cracking down on users who mask up in their profiles in an attempt to hide their faces.

According to The Korean Herald, this practice has become known as “magikkun,” from the English word “mask” and the Korean word “sagikkun,” which means fraud. People who use masks in their profile photos are assumed to be deceiving potential matches, because they are hiding what they look like in real life. 

Some users are avoiding swiping right on masked-up profiles altogether, where others use video chat or request a selfie from the user before agreeing to meet them in person.

Dating app Bumble said that it is actively campaigning to make cyberflashing illegal in England and Wales, as it continues to fight for policies to protect women on dating apps.

The term cyberflashing is used when someone (typically a woman) receives an unsolicited explicit photo via a messaging app or Airdrop. According to a study by YouGov in the UK, 41 percent of women aged 18 to 36 have been sent an “unsolicited photo of a man’s private parts.” This is illegal in many places, but not currently in England or Wales. 

In its own research, Bumble found that 48 percent of women ages 18 to 24 had received an unsolicited and explicit photo just in the last year, with 25 percent saying they felt violated because of it. A majority of almost 60 percent said they felt less trusting of others they interacted with online after the experience, and one quarter said that this occurrence has increased over the course of the pandemic, according to Mashable.

Dating app Tinder has confirmed it is developing a new interactive feature called Swipe Party, enabling others to virtually join a user as they sort through profiles.

Swipe Party was discovered by Dutch website GratisDatingTips, who spotted new lines of code added to the app’s latest update. Citing further proof of the new feature, the site also discovered that a developer at Tinder had listed Swipe Party as his main development project, further tipping off news outlets like Tech Crunch to what was underway. Tech Crunch confirmed with Tinder that this feature is in development.

There aren’t many details yet about how Swipe Party will work, but Tech Crunch noted that it does involve a user inviting friends to join and enabling the microphone and video functions on the app. The idea is that multiple users can observe as a user looks at profiles, and advise whether to swipe left or right, making choosing a match a group effort.

The new year typically brings new dating trends, and according to Match, Zoomancing, icing out, and coupling season will be the breakout stars, at least in the UK.

Match Dating’s Expert Matchmaker Hayley Quinn has predicted that these trends will take off in the new year, after closely watching the pandemic alter dating habits at an unprecedented level.

“Zoomancing,” or virtual dating, isn’t going away anytime soon, she told the U.K.’s Mirror. In fact, Match reported that 18 percent of its users continue to date virtually, even when they could have met in person. This is in large part due to Covid infection surges throughout the last two years and the emergence of new variants that have continued to cause more concern, even as more people get vaccinated. Lockdowns might not be required anymore, but singles remain cautious with people they are just getting to know. Plus, dating virtually offers people a chance to get to know each other before meeting in real life.