Types (Niche)

The Meet Group has acquired Growlr, a free dating platform for the gay bear community. Growlr joins MeetMe, Lovoo, Skout and Tagged in The Meet Group’s portfolio of mobile social entertainment apps, a move that marks the parent company’s first foray into the LGBTQ market.

The Meet Group acquired Growlr for $11.8 million using a combination of $4.8 million in cash and $7 million from its existing line of credit. The company pledged an additional $2 million to be paid in annual $1 million installments over the next years if certain revenue metrics are achieved. Geoff Cook, Chief Executive Officer of The Meet Group who co-founded the company as MyYearbook.com in 2005, called the deal “a meaningful step into the large same-sex dating market.”

On Wednesday March 13, Facebook and its popular group of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp were unavailable to many users across the globe. While the company struggled to address what was happening, people were turning to other social media outlets like Twitter to express their frustration with the hashtag #FacebookDown.

Ironically, Facebook also had to turn to rival Twitter for help in communicating the issues as the problem persisted.

Instead of being able to post status updates and selfies, users were getting error messages. Advertisers who spent large amounts of money on promotions via Facebook apps were especially concerned by the length of the outage.

Countries affected by the outage included users in the United States, Europe, and Central and South America. Outages in the U.K. were especially widespread. Reports of outages in Asia began several hours later.

Online dating is a fast-growing trend thanks to apps like Tinder. But does our ease with swiping, messaging, and moving on have further implications in our culture, including changing the way we interact with one another?

According to website Mashable, studies on dating app behavior point to a distressing trend. On the one hand, online dating has helped to bridge people from different social circles who used to rely on friends and work colleagues to introduce them to future love interests. Now, we can login to a dating app and start swiping.

However, it’s become so easy to swipe that dating apps have become a game more than a way to connect. You see how many people you can match with by endlessly swiping right. You meet someone for drinks to see if they look as hot in person, but if you’re not blown away with chemistry, you can easily move on. There’s no effort needed, and this is becoming a problem for people who are looking for more serious relationships.

February might be the season of love, but recent reports of hacking incidents may have you thinking twice before opening your favorite dating app. OkCupid is the subject of not one but two such stories - first a report revealing the dating site has denied a data breach despite multiple users’ claims of their accounts being hacked and stolen, and now the discovery of a security flaw from Israel-based cybersecurity firm Checkmarx.

According to researchers at Checkmarx, a vulnerability in the Android version of OkCupid’s mobile app could have exposed users to attacks of varying severity from cybercriminals. Bad actors could exploit the flaw to monitor usage of the app, read messages, track a user’s geographic location, send links with self-replicating malware or impersonate the victim.

“The disruptive potential of this attack is frightening as it is not hard to implement, it is not easy to detect by a typical user, and has high ​confidentiality​, high integrity​ and high ​availability​ impact,” said researchers in a post explaining the potential impact of the flaw.

Image: WongMJane

Details continue to surface about Facebook’s much talked about dating service. The latest news comes courtesy of tech tipster Jane Manchun Wong, who revealed that Facebook Dating will allow users to share information about their dates with friends and family on Messenger. The innovative feature is a precaution designed to keep singles safe as they use the dating platform.

Wong shared a screenshot from Facebook Dating on Twitter. “Share your plans in Messenger,” reads the screen’s headline. “Let your friends and family know when and where you’ll meet your date. Choose whether to share your live location and provide updates in Messenger.”

Meeting a stranger in person after you’ve matched on a dating app is an inherently risky proposition. Though most users are genuinely interested in making connections, the potential dangers shouldn’t be overlooked. Dating platforms have taken an interesting array of measures to increase safety for their users, including verified profiles, anonymous browsing, behavior pledges and strict punishments for terms of service violations.

Another day, another privacy scandal for Facebook.

A new investigation by TechCrunch reveals that Facebook secretly paid a number of users, including teenagers as young as 13, to install an app that gave the tech giant extensive access to their personal data. Users ages 13 to 35 were paid up to $20 per month plus affiliate fees to install the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” VPN app that tracked their smartphone and web activity, a program referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas.”