Matching

The trajectory of online dating has been interesting, to say the least. When online dating services launched, they were the future - a whole new way of meeting people that was conducted entirely over the Internet.

Now that the vast majority of us are comfortable with the idea of online dating, the industry is changing again, and this time it's moving offline. The new trend in online dating is in-person events that forego using the World Wide Web entirely. The latest of these social gatherings is an offline game night hosted by Match.com.

Match is no stranger to online dating innovation. The 18-year-old company introduced Stir, an offline events program, in May 2012 and has since hosted more than 2,850 mixers with more than 225,000 singles in attendance. Around the same time, Match also introduced an online games feature that offered singles a new way to get to know each other.

The games were designed to be a quick (just one to five minutes) and easy way to engage with new people. The initial seven games included Best & Worst, Food Critic, Romance Rip Off, Name That Dance, Gut Reaction, Drawn Together, and If I Could. Match's recent launch combines the playfulness of the online games with the huge success of Stir events, bringing them together into offline Stir Game Nights in partnership with the board game industry.

Match describes its new foray into offline events as "less about strategy and competition and more about laughing and having fun together." Two types of events are planned. At the first, Game Night Mashups, facilitators will lead participating singles through the games. At the second, Game Night Happy Hours, singles will borrow from a library of games to play on their own. Several publishers have partnered with the dating site, including Buffalo Games, Bananagrams, Blue Orange Games, and Wiggity Bang Games.

"Match.com believes that connecting with new people should be fun," said Luke Zaientz, VP of Events at Match.com. "Over the last year, we've seen it happen time and time again at our Stir events -- whether it's during a game of kickball, trivia, Ping-Pong or at our first wildly successful game night. We're excited to help our members connect over some of the best board games around, from well-known titles to the industry's newest hidden gems."

The full list of participating games includes:

• Bananagrams: Bananagrams, Zip-It
• Buffalo Games: Last Word, Likewise!, Chronology, Gotcha!
• Endless Games: Name 5, Oddly Obvious
• Blue Orange Games: Spot It!
• Spontuneous Games: Spontuneous
• Wiggity Bang Games: Open Up
• Marbles the Brain Store: Touchy Feely, Splickety Lit, Mind Your Marbles

Stir Game Nights will be hosted at bars and restaurants throughout the summer and fall.

A lot of travel stories are about bad in-flight meals, sub-par hostel accommodations, and confusing cultural mix ups. But this travel story is about a couple who joined MissTravel.com, met for the first time in Cabo San Lucas, and fell in love.

Their story was featured on ABC 20/20's "Vacation Confidential" segment, alongside an interview with the site's founder and CEO, Brandon Wade. ABC is the first to document one of "the newest and wackiest vacation trends" via a reality travel dating show that isn't too far off from its travel-and-romance hits "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette."

MissTravel.com claims to be the first online dating site to blend travel with romance, by bringing together generous singles looking for travel companions with attractive singles who cannot afford to travel alone. The idea is proving to be a popular one: more than 100,000 members have joined and over 50,000 trips have been planned in the 3 months the site has been live.

MissTravel.com has stirred up its share of controversy with critics who have compared it to a travel escort agency, but Brandon Wade is on the defensive. "Most people are uncomfortable with the idea of taking any kind of risk," he said during his interview with ABC, "so they choose to look at all the things that could go wrong with MissTravel.com, meanwhile ignoring all its potential for greatness."

Sibel and Steven, the couple featured in the segment, are bound to agree. Sibel is a 27-year-old from New York who signed up for MissTravel.com with minimal expectations. Shortly after joining, she received a message for Steven, a 31-year-old financial planner from San Diego who was looking for company on his upcoming trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Sibel says she found the idea of joining a man she'd never met on a trip abroad daunting, but decided to give it a go after days of talks on Skype and over the phone. They met for the first time at Villa Marcella, a beachside mansion Steven rented out for a whopping $2500 a night. It was a weekend full of indulgences - dips in the Jacuzzi, fine dining, a private yacht, snorkeling, horseback riding, massages - and when it came to a close, Sibel and Steven kissed each other goodbye and returned to their homes.

A few weeks later, Steve traveled to New York to visit Sibel, and a few weeks after that, she traveled to San Diego to spend a weekend with him. The first success story of MissTravel.com is still being written: Sibel and Steve found what they were looking for on MissTravel.com, and the couple is still dating.

The pressure's on for singles in Shanghai. The Chinese capital's fertility rate has dropped to just 0.79 children per woman, and now the city is desperate to encourage more young people to meet, marry, and raise a family.

The center of the city's dating scene is Shanghai Expo Park, where thousands of eligible young men and women gather in hopes of meeting their matches. 38,000 singles and parents attended a June 1st matchmaking event in the park, hoping to revive a marriage rate that is expected to fall 17% this year.

Shanghai is China's richest city, largest port, and a leading financial center in the country. It is also the center of waves of social changes that are sweeping the nation. An urban shift is shrinking the pool of factory workers who sustain economic growth in the country, while the ranks of the elderly - who increase healthcare and pension costs - are on the rise. City-dwelling citizens with higher education levels and a greater focus on their careers are marrying later and having fewer children, causing the Shanghai birth rate to drop to half the national level.

These shifts have caused major changes for Chinese women, who have become a larger, and increasingly educated, percentage of the population. "In the past, women were match-made by their parents," says Juemin Zhou, director of the Shanghai Matchmaking Trade Association. "Then, it didn't matter how old you were, or if your partner was blind in one eye, you still had to get married. Now, if you don't find someone suitable, you just don't settle."

Gong Haiyan, co-chief executive officer of Jiayuan.com, China's largest online dating agency, reports that women's expectations of potential partners - like owning a house - have now skyrocketed. "The first thing they look for," said Hansen Huang, a male attendee at the matchmaking fair, "is if you have a decent job, what is your salary like, if you have an apartment. Women are looking for a partner who can provide so they can live relatively comfortably."

In spite of these shifts, many Chinese citizens remain traditional. A young bride is still considered ideal, and women who wait too long to settle down many be considered "leftovers." "Women can be very picky when they're young," said Huang. "But if you don't sell when it commands the highest value, you may miss the golden opportunity."

The pressure to wed may be high, but Shanghai is doing its best to respond: about 2,000 couples were successfully matched at last year's event, a figure that bodes well for this year's fair.

Match.com launched in 1995, and the site's popularity is still on the rise. In the highly competitive world of online dating, Match.com consistently ranks highly in dater's minds, and for good reason: their trailblazing technology makes them a cut above the rest.

Codenamed "Synapse," Match's algorithm evaluates a diverse range of factors in order to match compatible singles. David Gelles recently took a look backstage at Match.com for FT Magazine, guided by Mandy Ginsberg, president of Match.com US, and Amarnath Thombre, a key engineer for the company, to discover exactly what makes the Match algorithm so special.

Ginsberg had personal experience with the trials and tribulations of online dating before joining the Match team. After divorcing her spouse shortly after leaving college, she joined JDate but had no luck finding a partner. Love later found her in the form of a co-worker from India, who won her heart despite being vastly different from the man she thought she wanted to marry.

"If I had laid out a criteria for what I was looking for, it would not have been a guy from south India," she told Gelles. "People are complex. You're constantly making trade-offs about who's too tall, too short, too smart and too dumb. People come in and tell us a bit about what they're looking for. But what you say and what you do can be different."

With that idea in mind, known as "dissonance" in academic circles, Ginsberg helped revolutionize Match's approach to online dating. "I might come in and say I'm looking for a nice Catholic guy between 30 and 40 who is non-married," she says. "But after weeks of looking at people, I might get an e-mail from a guy who has kids, and I might accept that." Taking into consideration the fact that most people don't know themselves as well as they think they do, the engineers at Match adapted the algorithm to pair users with potential dates based on a combination of what they say they want and what it seems they actually want based on their actions on the site.

Now, instead of taking user's preferences at face value, Match's cutting-edge technology relies on a variety of factors to match prospective partners. Stated preferences like age range and body type are taken into consideration, while the algorithm augments that information with the knowledge it gains from an intelligent examination of a user's behavior on the site. If a member's actions don't match their stated preferences, Match learns that those preferences are not entirely correct and that the member is open to meeting people who don't fit the original description. Synapse also looks at the behavior of similar users and factors in that information as well, in a process known as "triangulation."

As impressive as Ginsberg's contribution to online dating is, Match's amazing innovations would not be possible without its team of brilliant engineers, like Amarnath Thombre, whose story we'll look at next time.

For more information on this popular dating site you can read our review of Match.com.

Here is a small bit of news regarding Zoosk.

According to the WSJ, Zoosk.com plans later this year to start matching singles based on their tastes in music, movies and books. This update to the matching system is in response to a survey Zoosk did of its members that found 57 percent of people found it a turn-on if someone else liked the same books as they did. Zoosk also confirmed that common shared interests like those of movies, music and books are great topics for initiating a conversation.

To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our review of Zoosk.com.

Handwriting expert, Mike Kahlowsky knows that everyone's handwriting is unique and from a sample he says he can tell a lot about your personality and who you are. Mike started WriteMatch.com back in 1999. It is a:

... Handwriting Analysis Profiling Company specializing in Personality, Compatibility and Corporate Based Assessments.

The website though is geared towards matching singles together, the "E-Harmony for handwriting". When someone signs up to the service it will show you how to analyze your own writing. Based on this assessment and questions you answer about your writing, WriteMatch.com will then match you with other members of the site.

While I think handwriting analysis can work (to a point) I also feel it probably can't tell you all that much more about yourself than you already know. I do not see it becoming a successful tool which can be used for matching. It also is not needed; asking the person questions about themselves will reveal much more information than reviewing your handwriting.

For more on this story, read CBS12.