General News

In October of 2012 Spark Networks closed the online dating site Single Parents Mingle. This site was originally part of the MingleMatch group of dating sites which Spark Networks purchased in May of 2005. We have moved the review for Single Parents Mingle to the Out of Business category where it is still available for reading.

This is the second dating site that we know of that Spark Networks has closed in the last year. The other service was Asian Singles Connection (see Story).

Here is a video Christian Rudder (who is one of founders of OKCupid) put together for a TED-Ed presentation that explains how their matching algorithm works.



To find out more about this popular free dating site you may want to read our OKCupid review.

It's hard to imagine there's a digital frontier that Facebook hasn't conquered, but online dating might be it.

When Mark Zuckerberg launched the social site that would change the face of human interaction forever, he was adamant that it would not be a dating service. "I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating," he wrote at the time to close friend Adam D'Angelo, who later became Facebook's CTO. "I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too."

Although it seems obvious that Facebook has plenty of dating potential, attempts to capitalize on it have yet to catch on. In early 2012, Kingfish Labs raised $500,000 to bring online dating functionality to Facebook through an app called Yoke. Yoke matched users who shared common connections or interests, but had no strategy for initiating communication other than a - perhaps unwelcome - cold message. With no way for Facebook users to signal their interest in being matched for dates, Yoke faded into obscurity.

Now someone is trying to play the online-dating-via-Facebook angle again, only this time it's Facebook itself. The company recently held a press event for Graph Search, "a new search engine that lets members use natural language to pull up recommendations for people, places and businesses from their social graph." (x) Although Graph Search promises to be useful in several ways, online dating is clearly near the top of that list.

Facebook's new feature blends traditional online dating, which connects people who don't know each other, with Facebook's original mission: connecting people who are already acquainted. Type "friends of my friends who are single and living in Austin" into Graph Search, and Facebook will return a list of possible dates culled from just outside your immediate social circle. Results can be filtered by interests, education, age, hometown, current city and more, all while using totally natural language.

If it takes off, Graph Search has the potential to revolutionize Facebook and rock the dating world. "I think the online dating business has to be looking at this announcement and saying this could either be the best thing ever for us, or it could be the beginning of the end," says Dan Slater, author of Love in the Time of Algorithms, On one hand, Graph Search could cut into dating sites' business. But on the other hand, Slater says, Facebook could help the dating industry by removing whatever "cultural barrier" remains for online dating.

It remains to be seen whether this latest attempt to bring online dating to Facebook can succeed where others have failed.

To see how Facebook currently ranks by singles when used as a dating tool you can read our Facebook review.

It looks like sometime in 2012 Spark Networks decided to pull the plug on Asian Singles Connection. We should have caught this sooner, sorry. We have moved the review to the Out of Business category for dating sites. To see what the old review looked like you can still visit the Asian Singles Connection page.

I am not surprised to see this dating site disappear. It hasn't been doing well for a while and Spark Networks has been concentrating more on their religious dating sites like JDate.com and Christian Mingle.

Yikes...

OkCupid's new Crazy Blind Date app has barely had a chance to dip its toe into the dating pond, and it looks like some people have already dumped it.

It can't come as a complete surprise to OkCupid, seeing as they tried to launch a similar service back in 2007 and abandoned it shortly afterwards. It's kind of like going back with someone you already dumped...if the relationship wasn't good the first time around, it probably won't be much better the second time.

Christina Farr, a writer for VentureBeat, teamed up with ABC7 to review the reincarnated Crazy Blind Date app. The plan was simple: she would go on a date, and ABC would interview her date on the spot.

The sign up process barely even takes a minute, but already Christina was skeptical about the service. Although the app scrambles profile pics, it's easy to discern the faces anyway. That could be unsettling anywhere, but Christina found it particularly troubling in her small world of the San Francisco tech community. Members of any close-knit community, where everyone already knows everyone, are likely to recognize familiar faces - even scrambled - easily. So much for the blind part of the blind date.

Her second impression wasn't favorable either. She says she was "a bit underwhelmed by the sheer number of dudes whose ideal first date involves Dunkin' Donuts or Peet's Coffee." She also had trouble finding a date who A) Responded to her and B) Was available to meet at the same time. Finally, she found Robert Leshner, the cofounder of Internet privacy company Safe Shepherd.

She divulged the presence of the ABC7 news crew immediately upon meeting him. But Robert wasn't the one in for a surprise - Christina was.

A few hours prior to their date, a friend of Robert's had recognized Christina's scrambled picture and revealed her identity to him. He had a feeling he was about to be part of a story. The night wasn't a total loss - Christina did leave with her story, as well as a few margaritas - but it left her with doubts about the future of Crazy Blind Date.

"A few bugs prevented me from booking a last minute date," she wrote in a VentureBeat post. "The app would tell me that 'I'm already busy' on a particular night. I had to delete and reinstall it several times." There's also the fact that people just aren't comfortable meeting total strangers from the Internet with only a name, age, and scrambled photo to go on.

Blind dates are normally set up by friends, who have already vetted your date for you. Without that added sense of commonality and security, can Crazy Blind Date ever be a success?

Related Article: OkCupid Gets “Crazy”

Remember that story in The Atlantic about how online dating will be the death of monogamy? Did you find it confusing? Well so did The Atlantic, apparently.

Alexis C. Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, has published this: "There's No Evidence Online Dating Is Threatening Commitment or Marriage." Seems like they just can't make up their minds...

In his first response to Dan Slater's piece, "A Million First Dates: How Online Dating is Threating Monogamy," Madrigal leads with two valid points:

1. Jacob, the subject of much of Slater's article, is "an overgrown manchild jackass who can't figure out what it takes to have a real relationship." Sorry Jacob, but you definitely have a few issues to work out that have nothing to do with the glut of options offered by online dating.
2. And beyond that, "neither Jacob's story nor any of the evidence offered compellingly answers the questions raised."

Slater's "evidence" comes from interviews with people who run online dating sites. What kind of objective information is that? Of course they're invested in making online dating sound fun, easy, and addictive.

And while the article is full of those perspectives from dating site owners, it lacks perspectives from just about everyone else (women, gay daters, people who were already poly, etc.). Where's the look at how monogamy and commitment have evolved over time? Where are the stats?

Here are a few from Madrigal:

• The heaviest users of technology, who consequently use dating sites most, are educated and wealthy people. Amongst the same demographic, divorce rates have been declining for 30 years.
• A 2012 paper in the American Sociological Review found that people who have the Internet at home are more likely to be in relationships.
• A 2008 paper postulated that those who benefit most from online dating are those who have less opportunity to meet partners in other ways, meaning it could increase marriage rates by helping people who would otherwise be single find each other.
• The same paper also theorizes that online dating may lead to more compatible matches, and therefore higher-quality marriages.

Taken all together, the evidence suggests that online dating has one of two effects: either it makes relationships better, or it doesn't affect them at all.

There are plenty of other factors that could be influencing the dating market and changing the way we look at commitment, but none have anything to do with online dating.