Technology

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.

I've got good news for Apple fans. If using the Match app on your iPhone and iPod Touch just isn't enough for you, you can now get your fix on your iPad, too. Match has just announced a brand new, redesigned, fully maximized app for the the larger iDevice with iPad-optimized functionality.

Check out the new app in the App Store or at Match.com and get the scoop on its robust features below:

See Endless Photos With Stream

Stream is an iOS-exclusive feature that uses an innovative algorithm to serve up photos of singles. Stream finds the members closest to you and highlights photos in their profile in addition to the primary profile pic. Because the iPad has a larger screen, Stream can display multiple pictures at once. Ostensibly it's there to help you discover more of someone's personality, but let's be real: you're not looking for personality in the pics.

Make Quick Connections with Mixer

We live in an era of NOW, so Mixer aims to match you with potential partners at warp speed. Using geographic location, another exclusive algorithm, and your favorite swiping technology, Mixer makes it easier than ever to browse profiles.

Additional Features

Stream and Mixer are the big additions to the new Match App for iPad, but it's got plenty of other interesting ingredients to look forward to:

• Facebook sign-in: Signing into your Match.com account just got even easier. Now you can sign in using your Facebook credentials.
• Grid search: The impact of Pinterest is undeniable. Now you can see more singles at a time with Match's enhanced search view, which takes a cue from Pinterest's famous grid.
• Easier photo uploading: The snap-happy can now add photos from three different locations within the app's interface.
• In-app notifications: Stay even more connected in this hyper-connected world with in-app notifications.
• In-app purchasing: For the first time, you'll be able to purchase subscriptions and additional features while you're signed into your iPad app. How did it take Match so long to make it even easier to spend money on their products? Who knows, but you'll be glad you can when you're itching for an upgrade on-the-go.
• More ways to communicate: Your communication options are practically endless in the new Match iPad app. You can chat with potential dates throughout the entire app, from Stream, to your Daily Matches, and even directly from a member's photo. And there's no waiting – you can communicate from the second you start up the app.

At the recent Forbes Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia, Tinder cofounder Sean Rad made the surprise announcement that the company is launching a new premium service in early November. The upgrade will allow paying users more options beyond just swiping left and right.

This might make some Tinder fans uneasy. After all, the value of the app is in the sheer number of people using it. Will restricting certain new features to paying customers cause others to drop off and look for other cheaper alternatives for hooking up?

Not according to Rad. He says the premium service will include functions that Tinder users have long been asking for - including the ability to travel and use Tinder in multiple cities. Currently, you can only use the service locally, which means if you live in Los Angeles you can't look for hook-ups in New York.

But will people pay for this type of technology? Several hackers have taken advantage of Tinder's technology already and used it to create the very features users have been requesting and the premium Tinder will be offering - such as fooling the GPS-based technology into thinking you are in another city so you can scroll through profiles in multiple cities. Also, several hackers have come up with technology to "mass-like" profiles in mere seconds without having to manually scroll through, which is a very popular request from current Tinder users to increase their odds of a match.

And what about Tinder's current features - will new users have to start paying for basic services, or will some features be taken away to add to the new premium service? Rad says there will be no changes under the current free app, so users can rest a little easier. Forbes reported that people now swipe through 1.2 billion Tinder profiles a day, and that each day Tinder makes more than 15 million matches. The company needs to hang on to these users because its value is in the numbers. 

But Rad is trying to continue Tinder's growth, and that means it's time to add revenue - especially for investors like Barry Diller.  “We had to get our product and growth right first,” says Rad. “Revenue has always been on the road map.”

Forbes said the Tinder founder hinted at offering other types of services that go beyond dating, including features for travelers, though he didn't cite anything specific. Could we see a Tinder app that includes restaurant, car service, or hotel choices in the near future?

Clearly, Rad has big plans for his popular app. But we'll have to wait and see how the market (and their pocketbooks) respond. For more on this dating app you can read our Tinder review.

A new study by German researchers shows that men who are looking for more casual sex are more willing to spend money for the new iPhone 6 rather than purchase a cheaper Android phone.

According to website Science of Relationships, Christine Hennighausen and Frank Schwab of the University of Wuerzburg asked 350 men and women how likely they would be to buy an Apple iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy Ace. (The Samsung device sells for about 20% of the price of an iPhone.)

The experiment showed that men’s desire to purchase an iPhone depended not only on whether he was in a committed relationship, but whether he was looking for a long-term relationship or just casual one-night stands. As it turns out, men in committed relationships were no more or less likely to purchase an iPhone as compared to an Android. But single men who were looking for long-term relationships were less likely to buy that iPhone compared to single guys who were looking to score.

This phenomenon isn’t new. A few years ago, OkCupid did a study and found that daters with iPhones had almost twice as much sex as Android users. This was broken down further by gender and age, but the research was there – iPhones are definitely a sexual turn-on.

The researchers in the German study asked the participants about their sexual behavior, with questions such as “How many different sexual partners have you had in the past year?” and “With how many different partners have you had sex on one and only one occasion?” Higher numbers indicate a tendency toward flings, or a casual dating strategy.

When the researchers disregarded the men’s mating strategy, they found that uncommitted men were more willing to purchase the cheaper Samsung phone. So just because a man is single you shouldn’t assume he’s just looking to score. Apparently, his willingness to buy that iPhone depends on whether he is marriage material or prefers promiscuity. So the fact that more men seem to be buying Android phones is a good sign for ladies who are looking for long-term relationships.

The researchers found that more women in the study chose to purchase Android phones rather than iPhones, though their decisions weren’t influenced by their dating strategies as were the men’s.

Another interesting finding: single men who did purchase those iPhones tend to have them on display when there are women around them. This is not surprising in light of the findings – and the fact that those men put down a few hundred dollars to be first in line to get their shiny new devices, so they might as well show them off and see what happens.

Dating app Tinder has had to deal with a lot of security issues, despite the app’s verification system using Facebook Connect.  In theory, because of Facebook’s security measures, only “real people” can join Tinder, so users can sign up with some reassurance the profiles they'll encounter will be real. But lately, this has not been the case.

Spammers and scammers have been able to lure users away from Tinder and onto their sites, typically, with spam bots - fake accounts pretending to be real people that flirt with users in order to redirect them to adult sites - and take their money. In the past, Tinder users could block profiles, but they couldn’t report spam.

According to website Tech Crunch, things have changed. Users can now not only block accounts but also report spam. Tinder also made a technical update to address the issue, and the update was effective at cutting down on the in-app spam. Unfortunately, the spam bots just found another avenue - SMS. Phone spam for Tinder users skyrocketed.

Instead of luring Tinder users away while they are inside the app, the spam bots changed their scripts and started collecting mobile numbers from the users, sending those users text messages with links to the spammers’ websites. 

It can be really misleading for users to receive text messages from spammers who are pretending to be people. One example Tech Crunch used that came from a spam bot read like this: “sorry my phone’s almost dead and out of mins too. If you go on Tinderpages.com ill be there. Im sweetgirl4u on it. Sorry its free tho if you confirm your email.”

Tinder is still racking up complaints, so it seems the technical update hasn’t actually made a difference. According to security researchers, this is beacuse Tinder was successful in getting rid of the in-app spam bots but not the spam bots themselves. Lead researcher Raj Bandyopadhyay explained to how they conducted their research, and what it meant for Tinder:

“Our topic modeler looks for phone number related complaints, and then classifies them using Data Scientist to validate correlation. In this case, we isolated complaints related to Tinder, and then compared them to historical complaints. This gives us a high degree of confidence that the spike is specific to Tinder activity and not just an overall spike in spam. In addition, it is important to re-emphasize that this is a pattern we have frequently seen – fraudsters migrating to phone after being thwarted online.”

So it seems text messages are becoming the spam bot avenue of choice, since online technology has improved so much. Now, mobile security needs to catch up.

Today in “Yes, there’s even an app for that”: Healthvana, a new service helping to halt the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

These days we do everything online - from paying our bills to booking appointments to meeting the loves of our lives. And it’s great. There are clear benefits to living in a faster, more connected world. But where do you draw the line on going digital? Would you store your STD status online?

Healthvana is banking on the answer being “yes.” The service launched earlier this summer in partnership with the AIDS Health Foundation to offer people easy access to their own health records. Healthvana sends patients' results directly from the laboratory to their smartphones, via their website or their mobile app.

Healthvana founder Ramin Bastani told ABC News "It's a digital version of, 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours.'" Armed with your results on the digital device of your choice, you can show potential partners and new doctors a time-stamped status on prevalent STDs like chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV. (Note: Though common, HPV and herpes are not currently included in the app’s interface.)

"It's no different if you went to the doctor and got a printout and showed [your partner] that," Bastani explained. "We want to eradicate that idea that no news is good news."

Whitney Engeran, head of public health at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is also predicting a bright future for Healthvana. "It allows us to move faster with our patients and gives them a lot of quick information," he said. "Because right now if they're negative, we don't necessarily call them –- because we see so many people, we really only call them if they’re positive."

The problem, of course, is one that plagues everything in our digital age: security. What happens if Healthvana is hacked? Or if you lose your phone?

The service supposedly follows U.S. patient privacy laws known as HIPAA, because users can only access their results after entering through a secure portal, and no sensitive info is sent via email. Patient records are stored in a secure data center that only a limited number of Healthvana employees have access to.

Of course, Healthvana can only reveal the results of someone’s most recent test - which isn’t definitive proof of a clean bill of health and is no guarantee it’s safe to skip using protection. Still, if this app makes users more aware of their health, helps people approach a sensitive topic, and encourages more responsible sexual practices, it’s a welcome step in the right direction.

So far the instant record feature is being tested in three locations in Florida, and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation plans to roll out the updated app nationwide within the next two months.