Matching

Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)

Match Group is serious about its expansion in the Asian market. It just announced the launch of its new app Pairs Engaged – a “marriage concierge” service to compete with the country’s popular arranged marriage industry.

Pairs Engaged is the opposite of the company’s star dating app Tinder. There’s no casual glancing through photos and swiping left and right. Instead, the customers Match Group is targeting are looking to get married within a year and are serious about the search process.

OkCupid is known for its progressive approach to dating, and soon after its provocative “DTF” campaign in the U.S., the dating app company is launching another unconventional ad campaign in India to appeal to younger daters.

The new campaign is called “Find My Kind,” and aims to give more agency to people looking for a partner. Indian singles have typically adhered to tradition when it comes to finding partners – relying on friends and family members to set them up on dates or seeking arranged marriages.

But younger daters, and especially female daters, have more agency in modern India because they are career-focused and more financially independent than previous generations. In order to appeal to potential customers who are part of this cultural shift - but might not know how to meet potential dates outside of familiar circles - OkCupid has designed an ad that takes viewers through the dating app process.

The pressure to write the perfect dating profile is enormous. It needs to be confident but not arrogant, intriguing but not cryptic, unique but not outlandish, alluring but not unapproachable. There’s nothing easy about condensing your personality into a few carefully curated sentences and photographs. Inevitably, things must be left out. But which things?

For many users, the answer is sexual preferences. It’s an easy detail to omit - and some would say the rules of decency require such details to be omitted - but brothers Emerson and Morris Hsieh see things differently. The young co-founders launched Waves, a dating app that allows users to match based on sexual interests, and are currently part of famed incubator Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch.

Dating apps have long used hidden scoring systems to rank users’ desirability. Tinder made headlines in 2016 when then-CEO Sean Rad revealed to Fast Company that Tinder users were assigned and matched according to an internal “Elo score.” Tinder has since retired the Elo score in favor of an updated algorithm, but it is not the only dating service that issues users an attractiveness rating.

UK-based app Once is one such service. Not only does Once use an attractiveness scale of one to five to guide its matching system, the company recently emailed its users to tell them their scores.

Image: Tinder

Dating app Tinder is testing two new individual paid features on its app: Super Boost and Read Receipts.

The new Super Boost feature allows users to forgo the algorithm process and have their profiles pushed to the top of potential match’s feeds during peak swiping hours, according to website The Verge. The second feature allows users to pay for the ability to turn on Read Receipts for a particular chat thread, to see if a potential match has read their messages.