Types (Niche)

MeetMe Battles

The Meet Group, a portfolio of brands in the mobile social networking and entertainment space, is rolling out a new feature called Battles on its MeetMe and Skout apps.

“Battles brings an exciting competitive dynamic to Live, and we are thrilled to bring this new feature to our users,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group. “We believe that the addition of Battles will contribute to our growing video revenue run-rate, which exceeded $62 million annualized, based on the month of November, up from the $55 million number we reported in October. Momentum in video revenue has continued into December, and this past weekend we achieved the highest video revenue day in our history.”

Battles is The Meet Group’s latest bid to harness the power of streaming video. The feature brings together two livestreamers and their audiences for a live showdown. The competitors can challenge each other in a variety of categories ranging from music, to dance, to comedy and more. Each battle lasts only a few minutes. The winner is the streamer who earns the most diamonds by receiving gifts from viewers during the battle.

Facebook is closing out a troubling year with even more bad news. On December 14, the company revealed that a software bug had exposed the photos of millions of users to outside developers. This latest privacy misstep reportedly involves up to 1500 apps by 876 developers and may have affected as many as 6.8 million users.

For an app to be affected by the bug, it had to have been approved by Facebook to access the photos API as well as authorized by users to access their photos. A spokeswoman declined to provide a list of developers who had access to the photos to The Guardian, saying only that Facebook does not think all of them took advantage of that access while it was available.

Tomer Bar, an engineering director at Facebook, explained the details of the bug in a post on the company’s developer blog.

Dating app Hinge wants its users to meet in person over cuffing season, specifically over burritos from Chipotle.

Hinge partnered with the popular Mexican food chain to offer free burritos for its users from December 13-31, the height of cuffing season when people tend to hook up during the cold days of winter. What better time to share a hot, delicious meal with someone you met over a dating app?

Hinge users get a buy one/ get one free deal for burritos, salad, or an order of tacos, according to website Bustle.

Facebook has reportedly given personal data of its users to an exclusive roster of preferred companies such as AirBnB, Netflix and Lyft, even after claiming it had limited this data-sharing practice. One of the companies Facebook shared information with was dating service Badoo.

According to The Daily Beast, the British Parliament released 250 pages of documents, including internal communications between Facebook employees, regarding the secret data sharing practice. This potential scandal comes in the wake of Facebook’s launch of a new dating platform. Critics have been skeptical of whether or not people will feel comfortable joining in light of the privacy issues, and the latest news doesn’t look good for Facebook.

Facebook changed its data sharing practices with third party apps back in 2014 to restrict access, which affected many small app development companies like Six4Three that mined Facebook user data. The developer claimed in a lawsuit against Facebook that the social media giant favored lucrative companies and was willing to share data with them.

The president of gay dating app Grindr is under fire for a Facebook post in which he appeared to express opposition to same-sex marriage. Scott Chen, who became president of Grindr in August after it was purchased by Chinese tech firm Kunlun Group, has since deleted the controversial post and defended himself against accusations of anti-LGBTQ bias.

In a public status posted in late November, Chen wrote in Chinese: “Some people think marriage is a holy matrimony between a man and a woman. And I think so too. But that's your own business." Puzzlingly, he also criticized Christian groups fighting marriage equality and said he would boycott HTC after reports that it had backed US groups opposed to same-sex marriage. Chen’s conflicting remarks were translated to English and published by INTO, a digital magazine owned by Grindr.

Chen responded to the INTO article with criticism, calling it “unbalanced and misleading” and defending his post in the article’s comment section. “The reason I said marriage is a holy matrimony between a man and a woman is based on my own personal experience,” he wrote. “I am a straight man married to a woman I love and I have two beautiful daughters I love from the marriage. This is how I feel about my marriage. Different people have their different feelings about their marriages. You can’t deny my feelings about my marriage.”

Chen also chastised the website for not reaching out to him for comment before publishing the article.

Bumble has a lot on its plate these days, including a potential IPO, expanding its service to India, and becoming a content creator as well as building a “kind social network.”

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd about the female-friendly dating app, which has recently styled itself as a social media platform that promotes safety and helping women build relationships.

Bumble has been in the news lately because it’s rumored to be eyeing an IPO before the end of the year, with a $1.5 billion valuation. This could mean big news for the app, which competes with behemoths Tinder and more recently Facebook. Still, Bumble has managed to grow to 40 million users, up from 12.5 million in February 2017, which is significant growth compared to its competitors.