Matching

I know a woman that I absolutely cannot stand - and with whom I should be best friends.

On paper, we’ve got so much in common. We shared the same major in college. We have many of the same interests in books and movies. We share almost all the same political beliefs. She’s done many things that have earned my respect.

Now, if only we could have a conversation without one of us gritting our teeth. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is; there’s no apparent underlying issue, like competition, for instance. We’ve both tried to get along. I simply feel like we’re speaking two different languages. Chatting is never easy, even though we’re both extroverts. We’re somehow oil and water.

I’ve known her for many years. I’ve long accepted that we’re never going to be best friends, and that’s okay. Occasionally, though, I’m reminded by how compatible we ought to be, and I’m bewildered all over again.

The same thing happens on occasion in online dating. We see a profile that looks promising, and get excited, only to be disappointed when our personalities don’t mesh nearly as well in person as they do on paper.

The problem is that sometimes we want to believe the profile is the truth, not the person. We’ve become infatuated with that profile, and we’re not ready to let it go. So we try a second date, or a third.

Alas, like my non-friend and me, you can’t usually talk yourself into having chemistry. Sure, randomly bad first dates do happen, but that second date will confirm everything you need to know, if you’re honest with yourself. So if you find yourself in a similar situation, remind yourself: you’re not looking for a great profile, or a great emailer. You’re looking for someone who is just as good - or better - in person as they are on paper.

A few years ago, I was at an amusement park with friends when one of them shyly handed me his camera.

“Do you think you could take a few pictures of me today?” Kent asked. “I’m making a profile for an online dating site and I don’t really have any pictures of me. Especially ones that aren’t posed in some way.”

Happy to oblige, I did my best to grab good candid shots of Kent. Everything was quiet for some months, until I ran into him one morning, positively giddy.

“I just had the best first date!” he said excitedly.

“It’s ten in the morning! That must have been some first date!” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“No, no, the date didn’t start last night,” he said, blushing. “It was a breakfast date! She works nights, so this was the fastest way to actually meet in person.”

“Ooh,” I said, intrigued. “So you met her through your dating site?”

“Yep,” he said. “She moved here two years ago and only lives ten minutes away, but thanks to our jobs our chances of running into each other are practically zilch. And since we’re on opposite sleep schedules, it’s been pretty nerve-wracking writing her and then waiting a minimum of eight hours for a response. But still, that’s better than never having met her at all.”

“Well, it’s great that she seems so wonderful, but will you ever get to spend time together with such opposite schedules?”

“She’s going to get moved to a different position at the end of the year,” Kent said. “It won’t be forever. And - this may sound cheesy, but - even if it’s more work finding time to meet, she really seems worth it.”

Last month, Kent and his wonderful first date were married. Her inconvenient schedule was indeed not for forever - but hopefully her romance with Kent will be.

Related Article: Stories in Success, Part I

The perks of online dating are many, but spend enough time clicking through profiles and you’ll probably find yourself at least a little bit nostalgic for the old days. You can't beat the convenience of an online dating website, but there was something nice about being set up by your friends. It added an extra level of security. You felt comfortable in the knowledge that whoever you were meeting had already been vetted by someone you trust, and therefore probably wasn't a total jerk.

For a long time, that's been one of the biggest barriers online dating has faced. No matter what dating sites do to screen users, it never compares to the recommendation of a close friend.

Until now, that is. Enter MyCuteFriend, a new dating app that asks women to nominate their single guy friends as potential dates for other women. “Where every guy comes recommended” reads the app’s slogan, and that’s precisely what it offers: every guy who appears on MyCuteFriend has been vouched for by an actual, IRL human being.

Created by John Furneaux and Steve Chen, the app was designed specifically to make the online dating experience more pleasant for women – so you will see women nominating men, but never the other way around. After hearing constant complaints about online dating from their female friends, Furneaux and Chen realized that women needed a way to keep the creepy out. They enlisted a mostly female design team to create the functionality and user interface, and MyCuteFriend was born.

To use the app, women select a number of hashtags (which cover everything from body to brain) to describe their eligible friends. Photos are then pulled from the men’s Facebook profiles. Once a guy has been nominated, he receives a notification and must accept it and download the app before his profile becomes active. Women can nominate any man they are friends with on Facebook.

On the other side of things, women can browse the hashtags and photos, responding with a simple “Yes” or “No, thanks.” There are no long, boring questionnaires and no anonymous creepy stalkers. Women can only receive messages from guys they have said “Yes” to.

For even more customization, short video clips can be recorded and included in the profiles. Basically it's like the love child between Tinder and Vine, with a little bit of Facebook thrown in. So far the app has only launched in San Francisco, but will no doubt expand to other cities if it proves to be successful.

After years of off-again, on-again relationship, dates that didn’t go anywhere, and, yes, online dating, one of my best friends finally seems to be in a great relationship. They’re approaching a year together, with no end in sight.

They happened to meet at a series of company events, but they both have online dating profiles on the same sites. Naturally, one might wonder: why didn’t they meet sooner?

The answer is that they filtered one another out. For one thing, the guy - Steve - is a good twenty years older than his girlfriend, Lisa. Though Lisa was open to dating older men, twenty years was a bit out of her comfort zone. For another, Steve has children. Lisa wasn’t interested in having kids. However, dating an older man means that the children are grown and out of the house, and for Lisa, that’s a horse of a different color.

On Steve’s part, he too had filtered Lisa out due to her age, assuming he wouldn’t have anything in common with someone that much younger. He had also filtered out anyone with cats, as he’s allergic. In an odd twist of fate, Lisa’s pet cat had passed on earlier, and she had no plans to get another, but she hadn’t thought to update her profile.

Despite their “differences,” a quick perusal of their profiles would have revealed that they still had much in common - everything from their tastes in pop culture to their political opinions. And while there are differences, they aren’t on the opposite ends of the spectrum. If they’d seen one another’s profiles, they might well have messaged each other.

But they didn’t. They’d each filtered the other out, and met solely on chance.

There’s nothing wrong with using the filter tools of an online dating site; they can help cut through the white noise and help you make sense of the sheer number of options. But if you’ve become familiar with your site, and you feel like you’ve perused all your current options, it might be worth experimenting with peeling back your filters, one at a time. What if you didn’t place a restriction on body type? What if you didn’t worry about a height difference?

There are exceptions to every rule - but identifying those exceptions is still a task left up to the human heart, not an algorithm. Severe search options clean up your list of options, but occasionally it doesn’t hurt to allow a little mess.

Related Article: Stories in Success, Part II

What makes Tinder so damn special?

There’s certainly something that’s catapulted the dating app straight into the mobile stratosphere, but users, investors, fans, and detractors alike are still trying to put their finger on exactly what makes the app so popular. Carrie Yurie, a writer for the Huffington Post, had a chance to interview Tinder CEO Sean Rad after his talk at GigaOm Roadmap to hear more about what's going on behind the scenes.

Though Tinder seems simple on the surface, the app leverages a fundamental understanding of human behavior in order to optimize user experience. Rad says “We built…a flow that emulates interactions in the real world. What we’re striving to do with Tinder is understand what are the sort of social dynamics, physical dynamics, the flows of where you start with a request or desire to make a new relationship and how that progresses to you actually meeting that person, talking to that person and getting to know them.” Armed with an understanding of how human relationships are built in the real world, Tinder attempts to emulate that natural flow with its app.

One question that continually comes up where online dating is concerned is whether users are looking for serious relationships or just searching for short-term hook-ups. Rad thinks Tinder is effective either way – it all depends on a user’s original intentions.

“I think it emulates whatever you want in the real world,” he told Yurie. “So if you are young and you don’t want to be in a serious relationship, you are going to look for that on Tinder, or if you are older and desire something more serious you will look for that.” Ultimately, the younger generation that makes up the largest portion of Tinder's user base is all about going with the flow and dating without a specific outcome in mind.

Tinder has worked hard to appeal to its target millennial market. We all know how it works on the front end, but what’s happening backstage? According to Rad, Tinder observes a user's behavior in the app to determine compatibility. That's nothing new, but Tinder is able to take it to an extreme degree. “When you match with somebody,” Rad explains, “we look at the depth of the conversations you are having with your various matches. You might have a deeper conversation with one person of a certain characteristic or another person of another different characteristic.”

At the end of the day, Tinder prefers to keep things simple. The app is consistently grounded in real life, putting the focus on the human experience outside the digital realm. “It all comes down to what do people want to do, how do they want to do it, and how do we create a frictionless experience to allow them to do that?” Rad says. “Whether we are coming up with a feature or improving something, we always look at, first and foremost, how does that relate to some desire or some thought process that the user has.”

For more on this dating app you can read review of Tinder.

Traditionally, online dating websites match users based on things like shared preferences, interests, and goals. There's no doubt that all those things are important elements of a successful relationship, but there's one hugely important factor that dating algorithms don't take into account: physical attraction.

Sure, online daters can list vague specifications about things like height and body type preferences, and of course most of us are guilty of spending more time on photos than profile essays, but matchmaking formulas give very little weight to attraction. Until now, that is. A new potential matchmaking formula created by computer scientists at the University of Iowa puts mutual physical attraction front and center by only matching you with partners who are likely to find you attractive.

The formula works by analyzing your message history in order to make date recommendations based on shared tastes and the kinds of people you found attractive in the past. The scientists who designed the algorithm described it using a fictional online dater named Mike: “It is Mike’s taste that affects whom he approaches through initial contacts, and his attractiveness that determines whether he can get responses.”

In other words, Mike – or any of us – can initiate conversations with anyone he wants, but he won't get very far if he continually reaches out to people who don't find him attractive. If the people you contact never reply, all the recommendations in the world will never be of any use. The most effective online dating algorithm would be able to suggest matches based on the likelihood that they will respond to your messages.

“Considering the match of both taste and attractiveness, our model tries to improve dating partner recommendations by boosting a user’s chance of getting responses,” the researchers write.

To test their theory, they used anonymized data on 47,000 users from a real dating website over the course of a period of nearly 200 days. Their program analyzed the replies each user received and used them to evaluate the user's attractiveness or unattractiveness based on the assumption that people who receive more replies are more attractive. When compared with other methods of matchmaking – like pairing people based on shared interests and other variables they had in common – the results showed that the beauty-based method was significantly more effective.

“If a user approaches a partner recommended by [our engine], he/she will have a better chance of getting responses,” the researchers say. So far the attractiveness sorting formula is just a concept, but it's probably only a matter of time before a dating service seeking to be the next best thing turns it into a reality.