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Move over Tinder, there’s a new Facebook-based mobile dating app in Los Angeles.

Hinge likes to call itself the “anti-Facebook” for good reason. Instead of relying on GPS and matching whoever happens to be close by, Hinge tries to connect you to potential love matches through your Facebook friends and their networks. So, you’re not meeting “randos” like you might through Tinder.

Recently, The Huffington Post interviewed the founder and CEO of Hinge Justin McLeod, who mentioned that Tinder didn’t even exist when he was developing Hinge. Because of the app’s slower roll-out to the major cities – first in Washington D.C. and next in New York, and a lot of word-of-mouth advertising - many people have caught on and downloaded it before it was even available in their cities, including 6,000-7,000 L.A. singles.

When asked what the main difference is between Hinge and Tinder, McLeod says: “It’s interesting because Tinder started in LA, and I think it’s one of the places where it’s worn out the quickest. From what I hear, people thought it was cool when it started, but people burned through all of their matches and now the quality has gone down. I think [with Hinge] we have a great long-term solution for that because we have a curated app that gives you a limited number of matches each day.”

The app skews a little older and more professional than your typical Tinder users, too. Ninety percent of users are between the ages of 23 and 36, and 99% are college-educated. Most work in either consulting, banking, law, tech or media. McLeod believes the entertainment and legal industries will be strongest in L.A.

The best part? Hinge doesn’t seem to be loaded with guys looking to get laid. In fact, women comprise a little more than half the users at 50.2%, whereas 49.8% of men are using the app. It is a more equal distribution. (Hear that L.A. guys?)

According to Hinge’s website, there are many reasons to go with Hinge rather than relying on Tinder or the bar scene. It states that “if you meet someone at a bar vs. through friends, your date is 5 times more likely to lie about his relationship status, 14 times more likely to lie about his age, and four times as likely to have a one-night stand and never call you again.”

While these are good selling points for Hinge, there are still problems the dating app is working out, like how fast people can move from being matched to actually communicating and setting up a date. Because Hinge only matches you with a maximum of 15 people a day, you’re less likely to go through all of your connections. However, it makes the communication process a lot slower – with Tinder, it’s easier to sort through matches and meet up quickly.

Hinge is now available to L.A. residents, and is free to download. If you are interested in this service you should check out our new Hinge review.

eHarmony recently launched a new service called eH+, which provides professional matchmaking for those willing to pay a fee for more personalized service. Now, the company is introducing Ashley, the matchmaker behind the new service.

Before you start envisioning sessions with Patti Stanger and some TV-worthy drama, Ashley is much more focused on understanding her client’s perspectives. She finds out where they seem to be running into roadblocks in their love lives, and what might be holding them back. She works with them through one-on-one conversation, feedback, and a focus on finding a mutually beneficial relationship.

According to eHarmony, Ashley’s focus is to create a great connection with her clients so that she’s better able to help you find a long-term, lasting relationship. She’s earned Master’s degrees in Marital and Family Therapy and a Doctorate in Psychology, so she’s trained to work with people to help cultivate healthy relationships.

So what does all of this personal service cost? It’s not cheap at $5,000 per year. But if you really are focused on finding the right relationship and you don’t want to spend hours in front of your computer pouring over profiles and sorting through all of eHarmony’s guided communication, this might be for you.

In fact, with eH+ you don’t even need a computer. You can talk to Ashley via phone or Skype (or however you prefer). She also calls you when she finds a match for you. It’s a good option for busy professionals who are looking for a little more personalized service, like hand-picked matches and follow-ups after dates.

eH+ sounds similar to traditional matchmaking services that provide one-on-one support to their clients, but instead of relying on a smaller pool of people, eHarmony can pull from its vast database to find you quality matches. In essence, eHarmony’s matching system is still doing the technical work of sifting through thousands of profiles to find the right matches for you, and the professional matchmaker is providing an extra level of service to help you improve your dating skills and connect with the person who is the best match.

According to eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren, eHarmony has now 762,000 paying members, up 50% from last year. They won’t disclose how many people have signed up for the eH+ service, but Warren claims there has been great response.

eHarmony has its sights set to the future, though – and they are moving beyond the dating world. The company’s next focus is matching people with the right job. “Sixty-five to seventy-five percent of people in US are not happy with their job,” according to Warren. “They can be if they match on both the cultural basis with the company they work for and on individual personality basis with the person to whom they report," he said.

A new kind of LinkedIn based on eHarmony matching? I’d be curious to check it out.

To find out more about this dating site you can read our review of eHarmony.

Zoosk just filed for IPO last month, but already the hype is huge. Upon the announcement of its plans to go public, Zoosk was dubbed ‘the Netflix of dating’ by the media and investor interest shot through the roof.

The "dating services" industry was valued at $2.1 billion in annual revenue by IBISWorld in September 2013. 68.7% of that figure comes from online and mobile dating services. IBISWorld predicts that the market as a whole will grow by 5% over the course of the next four years. The biggest players in the industry are names that are familiar to everyone, whether or not they have ever used the services: Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony.

Zoosk may be smaller, but it’s no slouch. The online dating platform has over 26 million members, including approximately 650,000 subscribers across 80 countries. Zoosk’s membership grew from 18 million in 2012 to its current numbers, while the number of paying subscribers over the same period grew from 483,000 to 650,000. The company anticipates continued revenue growth based on its unique business model that’s similar to Netflix or Pandora.

What Zoosk has in common with those two Internet giants is its complex proprietary behavioral matchmaking engine. The technology analyzes your behavior on the site – from who you click yes on to who you linger on a little longer before saying no – to get to know you better (possibly even better than you know yourself). By tracking your actions on the website and evaluating your preferences based on it, Zoosk hopes to be able to anticipate your love life's every need, in the same way that Pandora guesses what kind of music you’ll like and Netflix suggests movies it thinks you should watch.

Of course, the stakes are a little higher when you can't just press pause or hit a skip button when you're not satisfied with the choice. Still, Zoosk is thriving. At the end of 2013, it was the highest grossing dating app and one of the top 25 highest grossing iPhone apps of the year. With a 2.9% market share, according to the IBISWorld report, Zoosk is one of the biggest players in the game.

That being said, Zoosk is not profitable. The company posted net losses of $2.6 million last year and admitted that it “may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future" in its S-1 filing with the SEC. For the future, if the IPO is to be successful (and the company as a whole), Zoosk will need to increase brand awareness via public relations, social media, and advertising. Zoosk must also create an effective system for retaining users and continue to expand its presence on mobile.

For more on this dating service you can read our Zoosk review.

Online dating has become a typical way to meet people outside of your own social networks. In fact, the majority of people have tried it at least once.

But what about the opportunity to connect via social media? Most people have a Facebook or Twitter account, and they contain a wealth of information about what we like, who we are, who are friends are, and what we do. The natural progression of social media is to harness this information and look to who might benefit from it – including online daters.

In fact, eHarmony released a study recently which found 7% of people who married after meeting online had met for the first time on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and ClassMates – not through matchmaking chat rooms, online dating sites or other romance-based online connections.

In an article in Time Magazine, Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of Communication Studies at University of Kansas, decided to investigate this connection. He wanted to learn more about who was meeting their significant others through social media, and how well these marriages fared.

He surveyed over 19,000 people who had been married between 2005 and 2012, and asked them how they’d met. Those who met on social networking sites were more likely to be younger and married more recently compared to those who met online in other ways. He was surprised to find that those who met via social networking sites were just as happy as those who met online, and those who met online in general were happier than those couples who met in more traditional ways, such as through friends.

Social networking sites have potential advantages over online dating sites, Hall noted. For one, you can meet people through networks of friends, which means there is some connection first. This puts many people – especially women – more at ease. Also, people are more likely to represent themselves in an honest light over Facebook, because their friends are reading their posts and making comments. You get a more complete view of the person you’re meeting – where she likes to eat, what TV shows she watches, what she does for a living. A Facebook page is a little more personal than an online dating profile.

Another interesting finding in the study was that most of the marriages resulting from social media connections were among African Americans. Hall attributes this to the fact that African Americans and Latinos were over-represented on social networking sites between 2005 and 2012, and use social networks to engage with their already close network of friends.

Social media is an important part of making romantic connections, and is growing in popularity every day. Maybe it’s time to check Facebook if you want to meet someone new.

Dating is never easy, but apparently it's especially hard if you're a woman living in New York City or man living in San Francisco.

According to data from 2012, there are 473,600 unmarried men aged 20-44 living in the Bay Area, and 396,373 unmarried women in the same age range. Men outnumber women by 77,227. In New York City, on the other hand, women outnumber men by 7,215. An online dating service called The Dating Ring is getting a lot of press lately for promising to fly a jet full of single ladies from NYC to SF (while sending a plane-load of men in the opposite direction) if they can raise the money for the stunt.

It started out as a joke, but now Lauren Kay, CEO of the dating service, is seeking $10,000 to $50,000 in Crowdtilt funding to buy plane tickets for some lucky single people on Memorial Day weekend. If the financial goal isn't reached, everyone who made a donation will get their money back, but if all goes as planned, the East and West coasts will become the sites of “matchmaker-curated dates” arranged by The Dating Ring.

"It's a crazy idea that started out in jest," Kay told the San Jose Mercury News. "But it is not that crazy to go to another city with better odds to look for someone special." She suggests that subjects think of it as “a fun vacation.”

Frankly, it sounds like the perfect opportunity for another terrible reality show. Just imagine all those touchy-feely Californians going up against the hardened New Yorkers! So much potential for drama!

Richard Lane, a Bay Area dating expert with Events & Adventures, thinks that local men “will want ladies at the same level of intelligence as them.” Men in San Francisco “want someone who wants to get up and go. A woman who will hang with him at the sports arena in sweats, with her hair pulled back, by day -- but that night, can dress up, go dancing and knows how to pick the right wine to go with a great meal."

Of course, the potential culture clash isn't the only thing that stands to go wrong with this silly scheme. Jeremy Bollinger, president of DateSwitch, a San Francisco speed-dating firm, notes that the setup is dooming New York women and San Francisco men to being in long-distance relationships from the get-go. "Why do this,” he asks, “when there are actually San Francisco women looking for San Francisco men?"

I’ll tell you why, Jeremy: publicity. And it’s working darn well…the Internet hasn’t shut up about the idea since it was first announced.

Tinder just announced that it's reached a seriously impressive milestone: it’s made 1 billion matches between its users. That number was just 1 million in January 2013, making Tinder one of the most memorable success stories in online and mobile dating history.

In fact, Tinder has been so successful that even celebrities are getting in on the game. Although you might think it wouldn't be hard for good-looking, A-list of famous folks to find a date, it looks like they have a little more trouble on Tinder than we under-the-radar people would expect.

“We’ve had celebrities reach out to us frequently throughout the last year, sort of calling out various frustrations convincing users that they were actually who they are,” Tinder co-founder Sean Rad told TIME. “One impediment is that sometimes their Facebook accounts, which we pull information from, includes different names than their actual likeness… So [celebrities] were asking for the ability to modify their Tinder name and maybe have a verified badge.”

That's right – apparently all kinds of famous people want nothing more than to be able to swipe right, but their potential matches assume that the well-known faces in their profile pictures mean their accounts are fakes. Making it worse is the fact that Tinder requires Facebook account authorization in order to verify identity, and a lot of celebrities use fake names on social networking sites for privacy purposes. It's a combination that's almost guaranteed to make the average mobile dater send a profile straight to the rejection pile.

Rad and his co-founder Justin Mateen know first-hand what that feels like. For a while, they both listed themselves as the app's co-founders in their Tinder profile taglines. Again and again, they found themselves rejected by users who didn't believe they were telling the truth about their identities.

“It was awesome [to know celebrities are on Tinder] because it sort of validated our theories that everyone, even people of influence, need help forming relationships,” Rad said. “It’s important to us that our users know we are committed to authenticity on every level.” So with that in mind, Tinder is adopting verification badges like Twitter in order to confirm celebrity identities and allow the famous and non-famous alike to intermingle without fear of being scammed.

Of course, Rad won't disclose which celebrities are using the app, but he assures TIME that “These are A-listers.” Sochi Olympians admitted to using Tinder during the Games, and Lindsay Lohan told her Instagram followers know that she found her brother on the app, so you at least know that you stand a chance of meeting one of the world’s most talented athletes and one of the world's most famous redheads.