This might be the craziest thing I've ever seen. And with the complete insanity that makes up most of my life, that's saying a lot.

Coming home for the holidays is a drag for plenty of single people. Some of us are lucky enough to have families who don't demand that we settle down, but for the rest of us, holiday singlehood comes along with a whole lot of disapproving looks from family members who can't believe we've chosen to focus on our careers instead of our hearts.

Enter Invisible Girlfriend, a site that does exactly what its name suggests: creates a virtual relationship with the (nonexistent) girl of your dreams. Subscribers to the nascent online service receive text messages, real voicemails, random gifts, a Facebook relationship status change, and even "emergency interactions" (whatever that means!) with their faux SOs.

In an interview, Invisible Girlfriend creator Matt Homann said "Our audience might come from a variety of situations: maybe they're in a same-sex relationship they're hiding from disapproving relatives, are trying to avoid the unwelcome advances from a coworker, or have chosen to focus on their work instead of romance."

Here's how it works:

• Step One: choose a plan that includes both virtual and real-world relationship "proof" to create a believable Invisible Girlfriend.
• Step Two: customize your new Invisible Girlfriend's personality and specify how the two of you will interact.
• Step Three: get back to living life on your own terms, and not on others'.

Right now, the company (which is still pre-launch) offers three monthly subscription packages to choose from: "Just Talking," "Getting Serious," and "Almost Engaged." For as low as $9.99 a month, you can create a significant other through texts, automated phone calls, and simple gifts. For $29.99 per month, you can receive premium gifts, real voicemails, and a Facebook relationship status. And for the highest price point, $49.99 per month, you can get custom girlfriend characterization, live phone calls, and the ability to personalize your own story.

"We're not trying to build a girlfriend they can believe in - that's a whole other level of technology," Homann told Riverfront Times. "We're giving them a better story to tell, even if the story isn't true."

The story of the company is itself a good story to tell. Invisible Girlfriend was pitched for the first time at Startup Weekend as a joke, but the idea quickly caught hold and a team created a rough product in just 54 hours. "It went from, 'Let's have some fun. Let's make everyone laugh,' to, 'We have the making and talent to build something that works,'" said Homann. They ended up walking away with first place in the competition, $3,000, and plans to launch an Invisible Boyfriend version.

Things we were into in 2013: Nelson Mandela, the iPhone 5s, bingewatching, twerking, Bitcoin, Bat-Kid, Breaking Bad, the royal baby, Grumpy Cat, and screaming goats.

Earlier this month Google released its annual Zeitgeist List, a collection of the top Google searches for the last 365 days that reveal what defined the year in pop culture, politics, technology, and more. "Every day, around the world, we search," Amit Singhal, senior vice president and Google Fellow, wrote in a Dec. 17 blog post. "We want to find out more about our heroes, explore far-away destinations or settle a dinner-table dispute between friends."

Because of that compulsive urge to search anything and everything online, Google is given unprecedented access to what captures the public imagination. The year-end Zeitgeist list uses Google Trends and other internal data tools to tap into the top trending searches of 2013 from 72 countries, and create a snapshot of the biggest people, places, moments, companies, and gadgets of the year.

Online dating plays an increasingly large role in the way we meet and choose our partners, so naturally Google included the year's most popular online dating services on the list. According to Google Zeitgeist, 2013's top ten dating services are:

1. Match.com
2. Chemistry.com
3. PlentyOfFish.com
4. Zoosk.com
5. eHarmony.com
6. FriendFinder.com
7. Tinder
8. Hinge
9. OurTime.com
10. OkCupid

Many of last year's entries are back again, though none retained the same positions. Match moved up a spot from #2 to #1, while PlentyOfFish dropped from the first place to third. OkCupid took a major hit in 2013, falling to #10 from #3 in 2012. Zoosk climbed a couple of spots to the forth position, and eHarmony fell slightly to fifth.

DateHookup, ChristianMingle, AdultFriendFinder, JDate, and SinglesNet all ranked last year but failed to make it on the 2013 Zeitgeist list. Instead, FriendFinder, OurTime, Chemistry, Tinder, and Hinge came from behind to take their place.

The most interesting additions to the list are, without a doubt, those last two. Tinder uses Facebook profiles to match members who respond with a simple left or right swipe to say "Yes" or "No." Hinge appears similar at first glance, but uses a "romance graph" to pair you with friends of friends that best suit your style - in other words, Tinder might get you a great hookup, but Hinge will find you a great relationship. Mobile dating took off in a big way this year, and shows no sign of stopping, so expect to see even more mobile services on the 2014 Zeitgeist report.

Zoosk's domination of the online dating scene isn't ending any time soon. The online dating site, which first rose to popularity by making romantic links between Facebook users, is preparing to create an important connection of its own - with investors in public markets.

Zoosk was founded in 2007 by Iranian entrepreneurs Alex Mehr and Shayan Zadeh, who met as students at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology. They moved to the U.S. in 2000 and launched the company seven years later. Zoosk acquired users quickly by tying itself to Facebook and the hundreds of millions of users who already used the ubiquitous social networking site to post personal information and photos. It's since branched out to mobile, the most rapidly-growing sector of the dating market, and has raised more than $60 million from investors including ATA Ventures, Canaan Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Crosslink Capital.

Zoosk is now taking steps to go public in 2014. The San Francisco-based company has picked Bank of America to lead its initial public offering, along with Citigroup and Royal Bank of Canada. Oppenheimer & Co. and William Blair & Co. will serve as co-managers.

In the $2.1 billion dating services business, Zoosk has a 2.9 percent market share, trailing behind Match.com and eHarmony in the competitive industry. Zoosk currently has more than 40 million active members, a success rate that can be attributed in part to the additional features the site offers. The challenge faced by most online dating sites is that, if their service is successful, their users have no reason to continue using it. Forward-thinking companies like Zoosk are counteracting that problem by offering other social features - like sending relevant discounts to couples or making date suggestions - to keep users coming back.

The approach is working. Close to 4,000 businesses compete in the dating services market, according to IBISWorld, yet despite that heavy competition, Zoosk said in May that its first-quarter revenue topped $40 million and that visitors to the website more than doubled from the prior year.

There's no question about Zoosk's impressive track record, but there are some questions about the success of these kinds of sites' attempts to go public. Following Facebook's troubled IPO in May 2012, there was a lull in social-networking deals. But Twitter Inc.'s debut last month seems to have put some people's fears to rest, and Twitter is now up 89% from its IPO price. Whose footsteps Zoosk follows in remains to be seen.

Mobile dating apps like Tinder have been getting all the attention because of their hook-up potential. But what if a dater wants the convenience of an easy-to-use mobile app like Tinder but with a little more promise that a meet-up might progress to a relationship?

Enter new dating app Hinge.

Hinge started in the Washington D.C. area and is now moving to other parts of the East Coast, including New York, Philadelphia and Boston. According to founder Justin McLeod, there are about 110,000 single college graduates in the D.C. area, and about 20,000 are actively using Hinge. The total user base is 30,000 and the average age of the users is 27. It's made about 200,000 matches, which are pretty good odds for a mobile dating app.

Part of the appeal of Hinge is that unlike Tinder, it relies on your Facebook networks (friends and friends of friends) rather than a location - (like who is single within a two-mile radius of the bar where you're having a beer). A good amount of information is pulled from your Facebook profile too, so there is a lot more transparency and more qualified matches than with other dating apps. You can only join Hinge if you already have friends on the app, so networking really works to your advantage. Also, it displays your last name along with your age, workplace, school and mutual friends so there's no hiding if you're behaving badly.

Hinge generates the basic profile but there is a bit of personalization you can do, including adding your height and religion as well as "personality tags." These tags are created by Hinge and offered as a list for the user to choose from, adding a little creativity to your profile ("Zombie Survivalist" and "Lawn Game Champion" are a couple of examples.)

Hinge borrows a bit from dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, where a set of matches appears every day at noon. (CMB offers only one match however, whereas Hinge offers five to seven.) The point of restricting potential dates is to ensure you have enough friends of friends to last for a few months, rather than trolling through all available singles in your network right away. You rate each other with either a heart or an "X," and like CMB and Tinder the hearts must be mutual for you to be a match.

This app might end up attracting more women, since Tinder doesn't really offer the same kind of pre-screening for its potential matches. Hinge is definitely an app to watch.

And I'm sure 2014 will keep offering us better and better options for mobile dating.

Newsflash #1: the new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project says that online dating is now completely commonplace.

Newsflash #2: that is totally not a newsflash. There's pretty much no one left on the planet who doesn't know that online dating is a perfectly acceptable way to meet your partner these days.

This latest study to look into the world of online romance says that 11% of American adults have tried online dating sites, 38% of whom identify as "single and looking for a partner." And if they themselves aren't searching for love online, they almost certainly know someone who is: 42% of American adults who use the Internet say they are personally connected to someone who uses a dating site.

The last time Pew asked Americans about their dating habits was 2005, and as you can imagine, things are more than a little different now. Since then, the rate of people who find long-term relationships using online dating sites has soared dramatically, from 15% of Americans in 2005 to 29% of Americans in 2013. The biggest booms have been seen amongst college graduates, individuals in higher income brackets, and singles over age 65.

For the most part, attitudes towards online dating are positive. 59% of those Pew surveyed say they believe online dating is a good way to meet people, which explains why 46% of them are using dating sites to find a long-term relationship or marriage.

Still, it's not all good news for online dating. Many believe that having easy access to so many potential partners actually reduces the chance of finding a long-term relationship, and a fifth of respondents say they feel that online dating is "desperate" despite all the progress it's made. That number, however, has dropped from where it was in 2005 and will likely continue dropping.

Online daters are also concerned about other users lying about themselves online. The majority say they have encountered someone who they felt "seriously misrepresented" himself or herself on a dating site, while 28% report being contacted by someone through a dating service or app in a way that made them feel uncomfortable.

On the whole, though, online dating is marching confidently and triumphantly into the future. And that future, for those who are curious, is probably in mobile apps. For now only 3% of American adults say they're using their smartphones to find love, but with mobile usage increasing in leaps and bounds all the time, it's bound to conquer the dating world soon.

On December 18, 2003 the first post for Dating Sites Reviews (DSR) went live. In those 10 years we have published more than 3,500 online dating and relationship articles that covered everything from the latest dating industry news to what makes a perfect dating profile. We also maintain more than 100 reviews now of dating sites and related services.

A lot has changed in the dating industry over the last decade. We have gone from about 20 main dating sites that shared the top spot down to about 5. We have seen a lot of dating services come and go. Some of these services just lost traffic slowly and disappeared, while others were bought out by a competitor.