Online Dating

It looks like yesterday morning Plenty of Fish and its sister site eVow was down for about 4 hours. POF.com went down sometime after 6am and was revived around 11:30am. Visitors at our forum and elsewhere on the internet reported receiving a "500 - Internal server error" when they visited the site. The dating app was also reported not working during this time period.

A 500 error code is a catch all error message that web servers reports when something has gone wrong and the server is not sure what it is. It is not a problem with the visitors browser or DNS but an issue with the web server where the web site is hosted.

POF has not reported why the outage has happened. From previous experiences we do not expect an answer.

The last major outage that spanned more than 2 hours in which we know of for Plenty of Fish was in Aug of 2010 (see Story). 2010 wasn't a very good year for POF.com in terms of uptime as they experienced 3 major outages.

Bad news for Tinder fans: all those creepy people you've been avoiding on the app may now know exactly where you are.

It turns out the dating app suffered from a bug for most of last year that would've allowed hackers to determine the exact location of its users. And Tinder chose to cover it up until just a few weeks ago. The information security firm Include Security exposed the security vulnerability in mid-February, saying that anyone with the right kind of knowledge could "get the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for any Tinder user" provided that the app was running.

Hello, major privacy violation!

The company confirmed that "anyone with rudimentary programming skills could query the Tinder API directly and pull down the coordinates of any user." From that API data, it is then possible to triangulate the exact location of the user with a very high degree of accuracy. We're talking within 100 feet. And remember that part where they said "rudimentary programming skills?" So not only can creeps get incredibly close to you, they don't even have to be smart creeps in order to do it.

So much for the fun of all that mindless swiping.

It’s a bad bug, for sure, but before you go cursing the day Tinder hit the app-mosphere, Include Security also noted in an FAQ on its disclosure blog post that these flaws can be "common place in the mobile app space" and will “continue to remain common if developers don't handle location information more sensitively." Is that more comforting or less comforting? I'm not actually sure…

What I am sure of is that Tinder should not have failed to disclose the vulnerability when it was privately reported. Users deserved to know that the security of their location data was potentially compromised, even though the bug was fixed sometime between December and January.

Your questions now are probably "Has anyone actually exploited this?” and “Can I tell if someone has tracked me using this privacy vulnerability?" According to Include Security’s post, “there is no simple way to determine if this attack was used against a specific Tinder user." In other words, nope – you have no way of knowing if that slightly unbalanced-looking person you just rejected is about to come knocking at your door.

Good luck sleeping (or swiping) with that on your mind.

See a demo of the Tinder vulnerability at work:

File this one under “Cool Or Creepy?”

It’s no surprise that Facebook gathers a lot of data about its users, but what is surprising is the conclusions the site can draw by interpreting that information. Of course Facebook knows when you’re “Single,” when you’re “In A Relationship,” or when “It’s Complicated,” but it turns out the social networking site actually knows a whole lot more than that about your love life.

Facebook data scientist Mike Develin works on the site’s search function, studying how people use it, what they’re searching for that isn't available, and how to make it more useful. Along the way, Develin and his team noticed some intriguing romance-related patterns.

It starts with a period of courtship. On Facebook, ‘courtship’ means messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, and posts are shared on each other's timelines. During the 100 days before the relationship starts, there is a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple. The peak is reached 12 days before the relationship begin, at 1.67 posts per day

At “Day 0,” when the relationship officially begins, a couple’s Facebook interactions start to decline. Presumably because they are now spending more time together in person, the happy couple feels less need to communicate online. The lowest point is 1.53 posts per day, reached 85 days into the relationship. Along with that decrease in Facebook interactions comes good news about the content: the interactions may be fewer, but they also get sweeter and more positive. Warm fuzzy feelings are dramatically on the upswing after Day 0.

On the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy side is the breakup data. The research team also took a look at couples who split up and got back together, and documented the saga on their profiles. The maximum, Develin reports to USA Today, was a couple who went in and out of a relationship 27 times in one year. Yikes. It’s a good thing Facebook also found an increase in private messages, timeline posts, and comments from supportive friends during tough times.

What all this means is that horoscopes won’t accurately predict lasting love any time soon, but Facebook might. "We have such a wide-ranging set of data, including on places there may not be data on otherwise," Develin told USA Today. And because Facebook knows so much about its users’ authentic identity, there is very little territory its researchers couldn’t explore. The patterns they identify could be instrumental in mapping human interactions and proving or disproving theories about relationships. 

For more on how to use this social network to find dates you should read our Facebook review.

It seems there’s a new online dating site every time I turn on my computer. And why not? It’s a billion-dollar-a-year industry and growing, especially now that most sites are adding mobile capabilities, which are growing at an even faster rate.

So to make an entrance at this point with the saturation of the market, you really have to come in with an interesting idea. And DreamCliq has high expectations – dubbing itself as “the Pinterest of online dating.”

Good news for single Apple fans: eHarmony has added a new feature to its iPhone app for version 4.1.

The app feature, called Datebook, is designed to help users plan, manage, and track their dates with anyone. Yes, that's right, I said anyone. Your date doesn’t even have to be an eHarmony member for you to use the app to keep track of them.

Vanessa Petrosky, Mobile Product Manager for eHarmony, says that “Datebook is the first eHarmony feature to be released on a mobile platform before launching on eHarmony’s desktop website.” As mobile usage grows, and with it the demand for mobile access to just about everything we do online, eHarmony is doing its best to provide resources to simplify and enhance the dating experience.

“Our customers have loved the eHarmony app for checking their matches on the go,” continues Petrosky, “and now with Datebook as a companion, singles will be able to schedule details for each date, bridging the online and offline dating experience.” And that’s not all – Datebook also helps singles make better decisions about who to date by doubling as a diary in which users can record their personal dating history and private ratings. “This new feedback feature also allows eHarmony to take the data into account and provide ever-better results for its users,” Petrosky adds.

Highlights of Datebook include:

• Add anyone: Add both eHarmony matches and people you’re dating outside of eHarmony to your Datebook contact list.
• Calendar sync: Any dates you enter are automatically synced to your iPhone calendar.
• Foursquare integration: Search for locations and get invaluable info provided by Foursquare, including photos, phone numbers, addresses, dollar ratings, and tips from other Foursquare users.
• Date history: Save all of your date details plus any private info you want to remember about your companions.
• Rate your dates: Privately rate who you're dating and where you're going. eHarmony will use the data in the future to suggest great date ideas tailored specifically to your tastes and interests.
• Date questions: At a loss for what talk about on the first date? Your iPhone to the rescue! Save your icebreaker questions to your Datebook Favorites, so you never run out of conversation ideas.

Datebook is free to all eHarmony users who register and complete the relationship questionnaire. And, of course, any information entered in Datebook is confidential and will not be shared with any of your matches. Want to give it a whirl? You can find the regular eHarmony app in iTunes here. Once you have completed the personality profile you will have access to the Datebook.

For more information on this dating site please read our eHarmony review.

Did you look to the most popular kids in high school when you needed dating advice? After all, they must be doing something right!

More often, I tried to listen to the good friends I had that knew me so well, but OkCupid seems to go along with the theory that the most popular kids have the most to teach the rest of us, at least when it comes to dating. So, I wanted to take a look at what they were saying.

OkCupid picked four of the most popular daters on the site (male and female, gay and straight) to provide tips for singles on how to online date.

The most popular straight female is a 23 year-old woman named Lauren who gets a lot of attention from her striking pictures and tattoos that cover her arms and legs. According to a recent interview in New York Magazine, Lauren receives around three dozen emails a day; in the last seven months, she’s received five-star ratings, the highest possible rating, from nearly 8,000 men.

Lauren admits she has an advantage because she is a make-up artist and knows how to create a good photo. Plus, she knows how to work the camera to show off features because guys are most interested in visuals. “I believe in a head-to-toe shot to show what you look like,” she says. “But you don’t need to have your ass hanging out!”

She also notes her love of astronomy, explaining that she likes to show her intelligence as well as her looks, even though guys still will message women based only on pictures (as we saw with a recent OkCupid experiment with the worst profile ever created).

She got a surge of emails she got when she first joined the site by choosing “casual sex” as a relationship possibility, along with long and short term options. This opened a floodgate of lude emails from guys. “I’m not a prostitute,” she tells the magazine. “But they don’t get that.” So she removed this description from her profile.

Some of the most questionable advice came from 29 year-old James Hawver, who said that he could double for Ryan Gosling, which I’m sure if it was true he would be one of the most popular guys on the site. He likes to accept every woman as a potential match, which I admire. When he uses Tinder, he accepts all matches even before looking at them. Same with OkCupid. He wants to know that a woman is interested before he starts messaging, so he only responds to the ones who accept him back, in order to cut down on the rejection. Because this can be time-consuming, he sends out the same generic yet flirtatious email to each of them, and gets quite a few responses.

He also likes to “round out the truth,” especially when it comes to physical factors like height. He is an inch shorter than his 5’10” profile would proclaim.

What does he do with all these matches? He goes on a lot of dates, and he doesn’t seem ready to settle down anytime soon. “A lot of us want the best: the best job, the best apartment, the best significant other,” he says.

So I guess it makes sense to keep on dating. For more on this online dating service you can take a look at our Okcupid.com review