Technology

Tinder who? Dating app Hinge has been on a slow climb uphill, but is gathering a lot of momentum as it goes. The app has broadened its reach beyond the initial major cities, which helped build not only its user base but also its brand as a serious competitor to Tinder.

This month, the app also made Time Magazine’s “Top 10 apps of 2014,” beating out the sensationally popular Kim Kardashian Hollywood despite the fact it made $100 million this year alone. (Tinder did not make the list.) Time took a dig at Tinder, noting: “Hinge sparked a flame in 2014 as it spread to more and more cities around the U.S…[Its] matchmaking connects to your Facebook account to foster friend-of-a-friend connections, a novel concept in a sea of dating apps that prioritize immediate, nearby and mostly anonymous relationships.”

Now Hinge is launching version 3.2, and due to audience demand is starting to change some of its policies, allowing for greater access to matches. Instead of providing potential matches once a day at noon, you can now view them at your convenience throughout the day. (I’m guessing this is to get people to log in more than once a day as opposed to creating a daily traffic jam.)

Hinge is also offering more matches per day. Unlike Tinder which provides an endless array of matches whenever you log in, Hinge is more particular, mostly because it has a more limited network to pull from – namely, your Facebook social circles. In order for Hinge to match you, you have to have a Facebook friend in common. (This probably encourages users to add more Facebook friends to their network, too.)

The app began in Washington D.C. and made its way to major cities including New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hinge has further expanded its territories in recent months – adding St. Paul and Minneapolis, Omaha, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Denver, Seattle, Houston and Austin.

According to a recent article in Wired, the company has experienced 500% growth since January. While it isn’t doing Tinder’s numbers in terms of downloads and number of matches per day, the company feels its more measured growth is a better indication of its potential for long-term success.

What is in store for Hinge in 2015? On December 11th, the company announced that it raised an additional $12 million, which will help its expansion into even more cities, including its first launch into international territory in February, when it debuts in London.

Hinge is definitely a dating app to follow. For more details on this dating app you can read our Hinge review.

Just how crazy are single consumers for Tinder? And how much will they be willing to pay for the service?

The company is betting that certain features will be very valuable to Tinder users who have been requesting them since the service launched. So valuable that the company will be beta testing different price points in the UK, Germany and Brazil, with prices ranging from $.99 US to $4.99 to as high as $20.00 US for the premium version of the app, Tinder Plus.

Tinder Plus will roll out in these three markets first to determine how to proceed in other markets.

Mark Zuckerberg has made plenty of comments over the years about the increasingly public way in which we live (something he seems to be an outspoken advocate of). There was also the recent controversy over Facebook's nearly-enacted real name policy. So it certainly comes as a surprise that a site so anti-anonymity has just joined forces with the Web’s most anonymous network.

Wired reports that Facebook launched “a Tor hidden service, a version of its website that runs the anonymity software Tor.” The new site can only be accessed by users running the Tor software, which bounces their connections “through three extra encrypted hops to random computers around the Internet, making it far harder for any network spy observing that traffic to trace their origin.”

Before you get excited that you'll finally be safe from Facebook's prying eyes, know that even Tor users are not anonymous to Facebook itself. But Tor can now protect your identity from every other threat to your security and privacy you may encounter while liking the latest clickbait from Upworthy. “You get around the censorship and local adversarial surveillance,” explains former Tor developer Runa Sandvik, “and it adds another layer of security on top of your connection.”

Prior to this development, Facebook made it difficult for Tor users to access the site – sometimes even blocking their connections altogether. Because Tor users appear to log in from IP address all over the world, Facebook's security infrastructure often mislabeled them as potential attacks from hackers. According to the Tor blog, “a high volume of malicious activity across Tor exit nodes triggered Facebook's site integrity systems which are designed to protect people who use the service.”

Now Facebook plans to be friendly to the odd, international connections that were formerly causing problems, and Sandvik says it provides an extra layer of security beyond what running Tor on the user’s end alone can offer. “When both the user and Facebook are running Tor,” explains Wired, “the traffic doesn’t leave the Tor network until it’s safely within Facebook’s infrastructure.” That means there's no opportunity for outsiders to spy on unencrypted traffic or decrypt it themselves.

Over the past few years, SSL encryption has become the standard for major sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter looking to protect their users’ privacy. Sandvik believes Facebook’s Tor hidden service may mean that Tor will become the next basic privacy protection leading tech companies will be expected to offer their users.

For more on this social network you can read our review of Facebook.

Antidate may be the antidote to disappointing mobile dating. At least, that's what they hope to be.

The dating app space is obviously exploding (thanks primarily to Tinder, but also apps like Happn and Hinge). The latest contender to enter the ring is Antidate, which hopes to knockout the competition with its asymmetric, gender-skewed approach to the dating app experience.

Here's the twist: male users are visible to women within the app (and their location is plotted on a map), but women aren't visible until they indicate interest in someone (by initiating a conversation, for example, or clicking a guy's profile). This strategy allows women to filter out unwanted advances while men get to sit back, relax, and let the ladies take the lead.

"When we first talked about a dating app, Tinder hadn’t launched and the only mobile dating apps we knew about were the gay ones like Grindr. We knew girls wouldn’t want to be viewable on a map so came up with the idea of an asymmetric experience for guys and girls,” co-founder Mo Saha told TechCrunch.

Saha saw benefits for both sides in Antidate's concept. Women could feel safer, knowing that their location information would never be revealed, and could avoid receiving messages from men they weren't interested in. Men who were tired of always making the first move could use the app to reverse the typical dating dynamic. “We also knew that online dating conversations are five times more likely to continue if started by a girl,” Saha noted. Win-win-win.

Antidate is still in the early stages, but it has a few other interesting tricks up its sleeve that might help it get noticed, such as:

• A real-time selfie requirement that time stamps photos, to eliminate the problem of people posting out-of-date photos to their profiles
• A rating feature, so users can indicate how much someone they met in real life looks like their photos
• Ephemeral messaging, so communications between potential dates disappear after 24 hours
• An Instagram usage requirement, which filters (no pun intended) the pool of prospective users and targets a younger, more social crowd

Although it's been in development for around 2 years, Antidate has only been out in beta on iOS for a few months. A full version launched recently and a marketing push is planned for the December holidays. Keep an eye out for what could be your new favorite dating app in 2015.

Most folks are probably content to hit Like buttons and swipe right without knowing how any of it actually works. But if you're like me, you can't help being curious about what goes on behind the scenes.

For those of us in the second category, there's this recent video from David Gevorkyan, principle software engineer at eHarmony. In the hour-long talk, Gevorkyan describes how eHarmony creates the highly compatible matches it's known for, and how the company leverages Big Data technologies to accomplish that goal.

Popular online dating company Zoosk announced this week the launch of Dating Insights, a new feature on its site that allows members to see a holistic view of their dating activity and preferences culled from Zoosk’s original “behavior-based” matching technology.

Zoosk has long marketed the benefits of its technology, which tracks how users behave on its site and matches them accordingly. For instance, if Zoosk notices that you mostly reach out to bookish guys, then it will start matching you with more literary types. It works for both daters and Zoosk, because the more you use the service, the better (and more curated) your matches will be.

The new feature Dating Insights will offer members information about their own individual dating preferences, and will also aggregate information about members who have shown some interest. The idea is to help you understand your patterns and preferences so you can have a better overall dating experience.

Dating Insights is divided into three sections:

Who Likes You – this feature provides demographics of matches who have shown the most interest in the user, like those of a particular age, body type, education, ethnicity, religion, and whether or not they smoke.

Who You Like – Zoosk sums up your preferences, not based on your profile, but on your behavior. For instance, Zoosk will let you know that “you put more importance on a man’s level of education than most” or “The Lord of the Rings is the book liked most by the men you’re interested in.”

Your Dating Style – this shows how often (and how well) you are using the dating site, and provides tips on how to improve your experience.

It only makes sense that the online dating company would harness its own technology to offer daters insight into how they are dating, since they use it to match daters anyway. But they aren't the first.

OkCupid has used information gathered from its own users as well to shed light on how people date online. Co-founder Christian Rudder analyzed the extensive data the company collected to understand online dating trends and to provide its members with more services they want (for a fee) – such as the ability to rate dates and filtering out people who don’t physically match your ideal. eHarmony also provides insight to daters as part of its package of services, though it is more personalized. eHarmony offers a “profile book” once you have finished with its extensive questionnaire, where you can find out what your strengths and weaknesses are as a dater and in a relationship.

Helping daters understand the online dating experience and what they want isn’t new, but hopefully the more opportunities daters have to see this kind of information, the better their experiences will be.

For more about this service you can read our Zoosk review.