General News

While Americans are wrapped up in the online-love-gone-awry tales of MTV's Catfish and football player Manti Te'o's real life story of being conned by a fake date, Britain is in talks to develop a new code of conduct for online dating.

The pan-industry effort includes the company behind The Times and The Daily Telegraph's dating sites, The Dating Lab, as well as Lovestruck and Christian Connection. Other dating services are also part of the discussion, but have so far declined to be publicly associated with the talks.

It's peak season for the online dating industry, so there's no better time to talk about the important issues plaguing users. Heather Heber Percy, chairwoman of the Association of British Introduction Agencies, told The Observer: "What worries me is that the bigger the market gets, the more it gets all about money rather than emotions and helping people." As a result, online dating scams are becoming increasingly widespread.

The Association of British Introduction Agencies already has a code of conduct, but until recently, few companies had signed up to it. And to make things even worse, the companies themselves are responsible for some of the suspicious behavior on dating sites.

An expose on Channel 4 in November revealed that one agency was employing people to create fake profiles and flirt with other members, to entice them to stay on the site. The investigation into white label dating site Global Personals, which powers sites like Dating Republic, Love2Meet, and FlirtNaughty, uncovered a host of allegations from former employees that Global Personals dupes consumers.

Global Personals claims it has stopped practices like creating false profiles, but they are just one site of many involved in similar actions. The new code of conduct under discussion will affect both users and the agencies providing dating services by ensuring the authenticity of profiles. It will also give companies the power to remove fake identities and cancel the subscriptions of users who are thought to be deceitful.

The talks will address how the industry should set standards around specific issues, like those mentioned above. Other topics to be covered are the protection of users' data and guarantees that adequate levels of customer service are available.

A statement issued jointly on behalf of the dating services involved states: "Online dating has come into its own and is now an entirely normal way for couples to meet. As the industry grows and expands, we want to make it as easy as possible for consumers to make informed choices and to identify the providers that are committed to the highest standards."

This just in, a little late: February 13-19, 2013 was International Flirting Week. I had no idea that was a thing until now, but I'm already fully prepared to jump aboard the Flirting Week boat. As far as I'm concerned, every week should be flirting week.

And as far as Zoosk is concerned, International Flirting Week (oh, and that little holiday called Valentine's Day, too) was the perfect opportunity to conduct a survey on flirting habits amongst 13,000 members of the site. Why do we flirt? How do we flirt? Who flirts best? And what better way to explore it all, than via infographic?

First up: the Battle of the Sexes. Who are the biggest flirts, men or women? Opinion appears to be divided on the issue. 53% of women say men are the more flirtatious sex, but 60% of men disagree and think women take the flirting crown.

Opinion is less divided over the reasons people flirt. Most, at 41%, say flirting is just playful fun. Others think it's a good icebreaker (20%), a way to keep the romance alive (18%), or a useful tool for attracting a partner (11%).

Flirting is popular for singles and loved up couples alike. 89% of men and women think it's important to flirt with your significant other when you're in a relationship. 54% of men will flirt even if they're not interested in pursuing a relationship, as will 41% of women (guilty as charged!).

What about when flirting goes wrong? Zoosk users think these are the Gravest Flirting Mistakes:

• Suggestive body language
• Corny pickup lines
• Inappropriate comments about one's physical appearance
• Coming on too strong and invading personal space

And who are the biggest flirts in the world? I bet you can guess this one...

Although 76% of American men think they're Cassanovas, the top flirting trophy goes to Italian men, 97% of whom say they are big-time flirts.

Two things are clear: flirting is exciting regardless of age, gender, or relationship status, and I need to move to Italy.

Says Robin Gorman Newman, founder of International Flirting Week: "As the Zoosk survey shows, many view flirting as fun even if they don't want to date the person, but it's also a way to jumpstart a relationship or rekindle romance. In our busy lives, flirting can be a quick and effective way to remind your mate that you love and are excited by them."

To find out more about the dating site which brought us this survey you can read our review of Zoosk.com.

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.