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Tinder who? Dating app Hinge has been on a slow climb uphill, but is gathering a lot of momentum as it goes. The app has broadened its reach beyond the initial major cities, which helped build not only its user base but also its brand as a serious competitor to Tinder.

This month, the app also made Time Magazine’s “Top 10 apps of 2014,” beating out the sensationally popular Kim Kardashian Hollywood despite the fact it made $100 million this year alone. (Tinder did not make the list.) Time took a dig at Tinder, noting: “Hinge sparked a flame in 2014 as it spread to more and more cities around the U.S…[Its] matchmaking connects to your Facebook account to foster friend-of-a-friend connections, a novel concept in a sea of dating apps that prioritize immediate, nearby and mostly anonymous relationships.”

Now Hinge is launching version 3.2, and due to audience demand is starting to change some of its policies, allowing for greater access to matches. Instead of providing potential matches once a day at noon, you can now view them at your convenience throughout the day. (I’m guessing this is to get people to log in more than once a day as opposed to creating a daily traffic jam.)

Hinge is also offering more matches per day. Unlike Tinder which provides an endless array of matches whenever you log in, Hinge is more particular, mostly because it has a more limited network to pull from – namely, your Facebook social circles. In order for Hinge to match you, you have to have a Facebook friend in common. (This probably encourages users to add more Facebook friends to their network, too.)

The app began in Washington D.C. and made its way to major cities including New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hinge has further expanded its territories in recent months – adding St. Paul and Minneapolis, Omaha, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Denver, Seattle, Houston and Austin.

According to a recent article in Wired, the company has experienced 500% growth since January. While it isn’t doing Tinder’s numbers in terms of downloads and number of matches per day, the company feels its more measured growth is a better indication of its potential for long-term success.

What is in store for Hinge in 2015? On December 11th, the company announced that it raised an additional $12 million, which will help its expansion into even more cities, including its first launch into international territory in February, when it debuts in London.

Hinge is definitely a dating app to follow. For more details on this dating app you can read our Hinge review.

For the single women reading, how many lewd messages have you received on OkCupid in the past month? How many guys have stalked you over Tinder? If you answer “too many” for either one, you might be ready for a new kind of dating app called Siren.

Siren is an alternative to the typical dating apps like Tinder, where many men swipe right to have more women in their cue - meaning, they play the numbers. They make the first move, often approaching women in a way that makes them feel pressured, uncomfortable, or just plain creeped out. It’s become a kind of risky game for some women, where they aren’t sure if they will meet someone and feel safe. If they don’t, the whole dating app experience becomes tainted.

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.

Move over Tinder, there’s a new Facebook-based mobile dating app in Los Angeles.

Hinge likes to call itself the “anti-Facebook” for good reason. Instead of relying on GPS and matching whoever happens to be close by, Hinge tries to connect you to potential love matches through your Facebook friends and their networks. So, you’re not meeting “randos” like you might through Tinder.

Recently, The Huffington Post interviewed the founder and CEO of Hinge Justin McLeod, who mentioned that Tinder didn’t even exist when he was developing Hinge. Because of the app’s slower roll-out to the major cities – first in Washington D.C. and next in New York, and a lot of word-of-mouth advertising - many people have caught on and downloaded it before it was even available in their cities, including 6,000-7,000 L.A. singles.

When asked what the main difference is between Hinge and Tinder, McLeod says: “It’s interesting because Tinder started in LA, and I think it’s one of the places where it’s worn out the quickest. From what I hear, people thought it was cool when it started, but people burned through all of their matches and now the quality has gone down. I think [with Hinge] we have a great long-term solution for that because we have a curated app that gives you a limited number of matches each day.”

The app skews a little older and more professional than your typical Tinder users, too. Ninety percent of users are between the ages of 23 and 36, and 99% are college-educated. Most work in either consulting, banking, law, tech or media. McLeod believes the entertainment and legal industries will be strongest in L.A.

The best part? Hinge doesn’t seem to be loaded with guys looking to get laid. In fact, women comprise a little more than half the users at 50.2%, whereas 49.8% of men are using the app. It is a more equal distribution. (Hear that L.A. guys?)

According to Hinge’s website, there are many reasons to go with Hinge rather than relying on Tinder or the bar scene. It states that “if you meet someone at a bar vs. through friends, your date is 5 times more likely to lie about his relationship status, 14 times more likely to lie about his age, and four times as likely to have a one-night stand and never call you again.”

While these are good selling points for Hinge, there are still problems the dating app is working out, like how fast people can move from being matched to actually communicating and setting up a date. Because Hinge only matches you with a maximum of 15 people a day, you’re less likely to go through all of your connections. However, it makes the communication process a lot slower – with Tinder, it’s easier to sort through matches and meet up quickly.

Hinge is now available to L.A. residents, and is free to download. If you are interested in this service you should check out our new Hinge review.

Dating is never easy, but apparently it's especially hard if you're a woman living in New York City or man living in San Francisco.

According to data from 2012, there are 473,600 unmarried men aged 20-44 living in the Bay Area, and 396,373 unmarried women in the same age range. Men outnumber women by 77,227. In New York City, on the other hand, women outnumber men by 7,215. An online dating service called The Dating Ring is getting a lot of press lately for promising to fly a jet full of single ladies from NYC to SF (while sending a plane-load of men in the opposite direction) if they can raise the money for the stunt.

It started out as a joke, but now Lauren Kay, CEO of the dating service, is seeking $10,000 to $50,000 in Crowdtilt funding to buy plane tickets for some lucky single people on Memorial Day weekend. If the financial goal isn't reached, everyone who made a donation will get their money back, but if all goes as planned, the East and West coasts will become the sites of “matchmaker-curated dates” arranged by The Dating Ring.

"It's a crazy idea that started out in jest," Kay told the San Jose Mercury News. "But it is not that crazy to go to another city with better odds to look for someone special." She suggests that subjects think of it as “a fun vacation.”

Frankly, it sounds like the perfect opportunity for another terrible reality show. Just imagine all those touchy-feely Californians going up against the hardened New Yorkers! So much potential for drama!

Richard Lane, a Bay Area dating expert with Events & Adventures, thinks that local men “will want ladies at the same level of intelligence as them.” Men in San Francisco “want someone who wants to get up and go. A woman who will hang with him at the sports arena in sweats, with her hair pulled back, by day -- but that night, can dress up, go dancing and knows how to pick the right wine to go with a great meal."

Of course, the potential culture clash isn't the only thing that stands to go wrong with this silly scheme. Jeremy Bollinger, president of DateSwitch, a San Francisco speed-dating firm, notes that the setup is dooming New York women and San Francisco men to being in long-distance relationships from the get-go. "Why do this,” he asks, “when there are actually San Francisco women looking for San Francisco men?"

I’ll tell you why, Jeremy: publicity. And it’s working darn well…the Internet hasn’t shut up about the idea since it was first announced.

Did you look to the most popular kids in high school when you needed dating advice? After all, they must be doing something right!

More often, I tried to listen to the good friends I had that knew me so well, but OkCupid seems to go along with the theory that the most popular kids have the most to teach the rest of us, at least when it comes to dating. So, I wanted to take a look at what they were saying.

OkCupid picked four of the most popular daters on the site (male and female, gay and straight) to provide tips for singles on how to online date.

The most popular straight female is a 23 year-old woman named Lauren who gets a lot of attention from her striking pictures and tattoos that cover her arms and legs. According to a recent interview in New York Magazine, Lauren receives around three dozen emails a day; in the last seven months, she’s received five-star ratings, the highest possible rating, from nearly 8,000 men.

Lauren admits she has an advantage because she is a make-up artist and knows how to create a good photo. Plus, she knows how to work the camera to show off features because guys are most interested in visuals. “I believe in a head-to-toe shot to show what you look like,” she says. “But you don’t need to have your ass hanging out!”

She also notes her love of astronomy, explaining that she likes to show her intelligence as well as her looks, even though guys still will message women based only on pictures (as we saw with a recent OkCupid experiment with the worst profile ever created).

She got a surge of emails she got when she first joined the site by choosing “casual sex” as a relationship possibility, along with long and short term options. This opened a floodgate of lude emails from guys. “I’m not a prostitute,” she tells the magazine. “But they don’t get that.” So she removed this description from her profile.

Some of the most questionable advice came from 29 year-old James Hawver, who said that he could double for Ryan Gosling, which I’m sure if it was true he would be one of the most popular guys on the site. He likes to accept every woman as a potential match, which I admire. When he uses Tinder, he accepts all matches even before looking at them. Same with OkCupid. He wants to know that a woman is interested before he starts messaging, so he only responds to the ones who accept him back, in order to cut down on the rejection. Because this can be time-consuming, he sends out the same generic yet flirtatious email to each of them, and gets quite a few responses.

He also likes to “round out the truth,” especially when it comes to physical factors like height. He is an inch shorter than his 5’10” profile would proclaim.

What does he do with all these matches? He goes on a lot of dates, and he doesn’t seem ready to settle down anytime soon. “A lot of us want the best: the best job, the best apartment, the best significant other,” he says.

So I guess it makes sense to keep on dating. For more on this online dating service you can take a look at our Okcupid.com review