General News

First, The Atlantic said online dating is a threat to monogamy.

Then, The Atlantic said online dating is in no way a threat to commitment or marriage.

And then, just when it seemed like the fickle magazine couldn't make up its mind, The Atlantic said this: there is something hurting monogamy, but it definitely isn't online dating. Sure, online dating is a big deal these days, but, says Jordan Weissmann, "there are much, much bigger social forces at work in this country."

Just look, he suggests, at the huge shortage of college educated men in America. It's a subject The Atlantic knows well - Kate Bolick wrote a piece called "All the Single Ladies" back in November 2011 that promptly went viral.

In the article, Bolick argues that an eruption of male joblessness and a sharp decline in men's life prospects have have disturbed the "romantic market" in ways that significantly limit a marriage-minded woman's options. Women are left with two undesirable options: deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing).

Weissmann agrees with Bolick's thesis. "Across the United States today," he writes, "young women are much more likely to graduate from college than their male peers, a trend that's been compounding itself for a few decades now." When you take into account the fact that college graduates overwhelmingly tend to date other college graduates, you find yourself with an enormous imbalance in the national dating pool.

Nearly two centuries of social science research suggests that, when the gender ratio is skewed and there are fewer men than women, men are less likely to commit. In 1938, Marica Guttentag and Robert Secord posited the theory that men are more promiscuous in female-heavy populations and more faithful in male-heavy populations. Other researchers found that, in developed countries, a higher ratio of men leads to more marriage for women, less divorce, and fewer illegitimate children.

More contemporary research has shown that "female college students are less likely to have a boyfriend or go on traditional dates, and are more likely to have bad feelings about the men on campus, at schools that enroll disproportionate number of women."

Something may indeed be changing our ideas about monogamy, but it's unlikely to be online dating. This brave new world also presents an opportunity: it's time for our ideas about romance, family, and commitment to evolve, and time to abolish "traditional" marriage as society's highest ideal.

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”