Features

Badoo Look A Like

Ever downloaded Tinder or Bumble in the hopes of meeting someone who looked like Ryan Gosling or Chris Pratt? Well, look no further – dating app Badoo has launched its new Lookalikes feature to help you out.

The app provides a list of various celebrities for users to choose from (think Beyonce, Kim Kardashian, Jessica Alba, Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and even Donald Trump). When you click on that celebrity’s photo, a list of choices with profile pictures of your matches appears.

The app uses facial recognition technology to scour their database of 350 million daters to deliver the results. The matches aren’t exactly spitting images, but there are certain features that they and their celebrity counterparts have in common to consider them a lookalike. (Although I question a 40-something Jennifer Lawrence, for instance).

How to use the Bumble SuperSwipe

Dating apps are not only looking to differentiate themselves in a crowded market, they are trying to find ways to monetize without alienating customers. And now, female-friendly app Bumble is taking a leaf out of Tinder’s playbook and adding a new feature called SuperSwipe, similar to Tinder’s Super Like.

SuperSwipe allows users to call attention to someone they are really interested in, by clicking a heart on the chosen profile before swiping right and hoping for a match. The benefit is that your SuperSwipe can see that you’re interested before he swipes left or right, which hopefully increases your chances of matching with him.

Super Like on Tinder is very similar; your potential match can see that you’ve chosen to Super Like him in advance. Super Like is also only available via the app’s premium service, and it seems Bumble is following suit.

Love can feel like a game sometimes, and in this case, it’s literal. Happn is testing a new gamified feature for singles in Spain, a simple but addictive game called CrushTime.

CrushTime is designed to give users another opportunity to connect with people they cross paths with in real life. At the start of the game, CrushTime presents four users you’ve recently been near. One is a person who has already liked you (a “Crush”), and it’s up to you to figure out which one it is.

If your intuition is on point and you guess correctly, you can start chatting in-app immediately with your new match. If you’re wrong, it’s simply a non-mutual like and no one knows but you. You can either start a new game or try again if you’re into one of the remaining profiles.

Dating apps have to set themselves apart from the rigorous competition, and it seems new features are being introduced weekly. The latest is from dating app Happn, who announced a new matching feature called “Crush Time” to help its users find matches.

Crush Time is purposefully game-like, which makes it interesting. It shows you four profiles, and you have to guess which one already liked you. If you guess correctly, you can start messaging right away with the in-app messaging feature. If you don’t guess correctly, then you don’t match (because it’s not a mutual like).

Another unique twist to Crush Time is the fact that you can’t just endlessly play the game. It pops up every so often, so you have to watch for it. (This of course adds to the stickiness of checking the Happn app more than you otherwise might). It makes the game all the more exciting when you get to play.

Plenty of Fish is keeping things fresh with an updated look for its iOS and Android apps, and a brand new feature designed to help singles get the conversation started.

PoF is all about the chat right now. After releasing Conversation Nation, the largest study of singles and conversation ever conducted, the dating service is putting communication front and center.

Data from the study found that 74 percent of single Americans believe small talk is worthwhile because it helps break the ice and provides basic information about a potential date. The majority of singles also believe a great conversation is the top indicator of a successful date. However, 61 percent of singles believe the rise in technology usage has impacted our ability to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations, and 65 percent say conversation is a lost art.

Video is in. After the explosive success of Snapchat, competitor social networks scrambled to launch Stories features of their own. Instagram’s copycat proved so popular that Instagram Stories usage surpassed all Snapchat activity in April 2017.

Yet despite the success stories, online dating remains mysteriously absent from that race to innovate. On the surface, the search for love seems like an ideal candidate for video - if a picture on a profile is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth several times that - but few dating services have dared incorporate video into their features.

Hinge and Lively hope to be at the forefront of the eventual, seemingly inevitable, push to make video a regular part of the digital dating experience. Lively, a video-based social app, recently announced the release of augmented live video chat, while Hinge debuted a feature to add video clips to profiles.