Tinder

Tinder stalkers of the world, rejoice! After testing a chronological feed with users in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada late last year, Tinder has announced it’s rolling out the feature to all users worldwide.

A December 2017 blog post describes Feed as “an exciting new way to see more of what someone is all about by giving you a true glimpse into their world—their passions, their personality, their latest adventure—all leading to better conversations and deeper connections.”

Feed aggregates real-time updates from your matches, including recent photos and Spotify Anthems, to present “a visual and interactive experience that helps you spark conversation with the people you want to meet most.” Posts appear in the timeline in order beginning with the most recent changes to a profile. A match’s occupation and distance from you (the last time they opened the app) is also listed beneath each entry.

The relationship between Bumble and Tinder took a toxic turn last month when Match Group, Tinder’s parent company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against its female-friendly competitor.

The suit, filed in Texas on March 16, accuses Bumble of copying key elements of Tinder’s functionality and alleges that trade secrets were stolen by Bumble employees who previously worked at Tinder. Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s founder and CEO, was herself a Tinder executive before filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company in 2014 and leaving to start her own venture.

Herd was initially silent when news of the Match Group lawsuit broke, but has since responded in grand, defiant fashion with a full page ad in the New York Times as well on their blog.

There’s no love lost between dating app rivals Tinder and Bumble. Shortly after it was revealed that Tinder will enable a Bumble-style ladies-first messaging feature in a future update, news has broken that Tinder is suing Bumble for patent infringement.

Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg divulged Tinder’s patent acquisition in a Q4 earnings call last month.

“On the product front, Tinder has been on the cutting edge of innovation since its inception in 2012, inventing the swipe gesture, which has since become this cultural phenomenon of 'swipe right' and 'swipe left' and that is often imitated on mobile products,” she said.

Blockchain technology has become a buzzword these days, thanks to the soaring popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Now, new dating app companies are incorporating the same blockchain technology into their matching and verification processes to compete with big-name brands like Tinder.

There is a growing need for dating apps to address a persistent problem in online dating: lying and misrepresentation in dating profiles. Most dating apps use social media accounts as a way of verifying profiles, but this hasn’t curbed the proliferation of fake accounts and scammers. Blockchain technology is based in a democratic oversight of users, by users, to improve the overall experience.

Tinder changed the game for online dating, creating a mainstream acceptance of looking for love by swiping over a phone. A large part of the app’s success was gameifying the online dating process – look at a picture, and swipe left or right depending on whether or not you were interested. It was possible to go through dozens of profiles in seconds, making the swiping process more fun than pouring over dating profiles.

Tinder is taking a cue from one of its main rivals. According to a report from MarketWatch, a future update will introduce the ability for female users to decide whether they want to initiate all conversations with future matches.

The ladies-message-first arrangement was made famous by Bumble, which was launched by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd following her acrimonious departure from the company. Unlike its rival, however, Tinder will not make ladies-first messaging the default; instead, any user who wishes to opt in can enable the feature in their settings.

“Often, women don’t really want the pressure of kicking off the conversation, but if they want it, that’s great,” Match Group Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg told MarketWatch. “Giving people the choice versus telling people how to engage is the big difference.”

Emojis have come a long way since they first invaded our phones with their colorful cartoon depictions of food, faces, furry creatures, and other now-iconic symbols. Updates have given us mythical creatures, a hand taking a selfie, and a much-hyped avocado.

The most important change by far came in 2015, when an Apple update made emojis available for a diverse range of skin tones and same-sex couples for the first time. It was progress, but for a group of advocates that includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Emojination founder Jennifer 8. Lee, it wasn’t progress enough.

They have joined forces with Tinder to launch a campaign to petition the Unicode Consortium to introduce interracial couple emoji. Currently, the emoji featuring couples only show people of the same race. Under the new proposal, 21 different combinations of gender and race would be possible.