Features

Who amongst us can honestly say they have never agonized over an online dating photo? It's a rite of passage in 2016: take a photo, edit it, post it, rethink it, delete it, start again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

If you've ever struggled to determine which of your many (many) selfies belong on your dating profile, Coffee Meets Bagel now offers a solution. From now on, CMB users can A/B test photos by uploading two options and letting other users vote for the best one.

The new feature is called Photo Lab. When clicked, a screen that says “Put your best face forward” is shown. Hit the “+” button to add two photos from your profile, from Facebook, or from your smartphone’s photo gallery. When other users have had time to vote and your report is ready, you’ll receive a notification. The report is unlocked by using “beans,” Coffee Meets Bagel’s in-app currency.  

Of course, Photo Lab also allows you take the opposite role and give other users photo feedback. You'll see a familiar Hot Or Not-style interface and can vote by clicking on the photo you prefer. After you’ve voted, you’ll see a percentage that indicates how other users rated the same two pictures and will earn beans for your efforts.

It will come as a shock to no online dater that pictures are one of the most important parts of your profile. Coffee Meets Bagel polled singles and found that 54% pass on prospective dates for picture-related reasons. The most common offenses include blurry images and the so-called “Where’s Waldo” pics that feature so many people that the profile owner is unidentifiable.

“Surprisingly, a large percentage of online daters have a hard time when it comes to choosing which photo to use on their profile,” Dawoon Kang, co-founder of Coffee Meets Bagel, told TechCrunch. Yet they “get no feedback whatsoever on which profile photo actually works best.”  

This isn't the first time Coffee Meets Bagel has tried to give its users a leg up in the search for love. The site and mobile app already offer premium features to help singles determine whether their profile is working. CMB members with enough beans can find out how they rank on the site and get feedback on the reasons matches say yes.  

Coffee Meets Bagel hopes the new feature will further cement its reputation as a platform for serious dating. CMBl is for “singles looking for real relationships – not browsing, not entertainment, not hook ups,” said Kang.

Watch a quick video on Photo Lab here.

Tinder has released a new update for users to help improve the photo selection process and enhance messaging options.

The update is a result of one of Tinder’s most requested features: the ability to upload profile photos to the app directly from your camera roll. The old version of the app pulled photos from Facebook only, which didn’t give users much flexibility. Instead of being able to pull photos from their camera roll specifically for the dating app, they would have to post photos to their Facebook profile (and advertise their flirtatious Tinder selfies to all their friends), or try to get around the problem by creating a fake Facebook profile (not so easy to do), or adding “private” photo albums.

Now, users can pull photos directly from their camera rolls, bypassing Facebook. And to enhance this feature, Tinder has made cards and photos larger on the screen.

While this comes as a relief to many Tinder fans, another issue has been created. Tinder already has a challenge with some users creating fake profiles to scam other users, but the fact that every user has to tie their account to a real Facebook account made things a bit more secure. Now with the latest update, it’s much easier to post fake photos, so there might be a backlash with the current security measures.

Co-founder of Scamalytics Dan Winchester noted that this is good news for scammers, because it reduces the obstacle of having to create a fake Facebook profile. “Scammers almost universally rely on faking their identity in order to execute their scams. On a photo dating app like Tinder, clearly the photo is one of the key things they need to fake...adding direct from camera roll makes life even easier for scammers, and Tinder will want to balance the undoubted appeal of this feature with users against the increased security risk introduced into their platform.”

Another important feature in the new update concerns messaging. With a nod to Facebook features, Tinder is allowing you to “like” a message by tapping a green heart that appears next to a message you receive. iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users can also use 3D touch to preview links sent within messages. And yes, emojis will now be available in larger format – just to make things more fun.

Tinder has also teamed up with GIPHY to allow users to exchange GIFs with their matches. (And yes, there are millions of your favorite GIFS  - including one of a Kristin Wiig character from Saturday Night Live and numerous cute kittens, in case you were wondering about the options.) To use a GIF, you can select the blue “GIF” button found at the bottom left of the chat interface.

To find out more about this dating app, please read our review of Tinder.

Lulu, a dating app designed to help women rate and share information about the men they date, has become part of online dating giant Badoo.

Lulu has had an interesting history. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Chong, the app was originally created to help women have a safer online dating experience by encouraging them to communicate with other women over the app about the men they dated. Users were given the ability to rate their dates according to looks, humor, ambition, and even sexual prowess. They could also add pre-made hashtags for more detailed examples describing a man, like #OneWomanMan, #WillActSilly or #EpicLaugh.

Another new dating app has hit the market to compete with Tinder, the ever-popular app that is both cherished and demonized for changing the landscape of dating. Precisely takes the user-friendly format of Tinder (swiping), and combines it with a clickable menu of over 200 filters across 25 different categories, so you can select descriptions according to your preferences.

Dating sites like OkCupid and Match are two successful yet traditional online dating platforms, and their matching algorithms also use descriptions. However, these sites rely on users answering questions and writing detailed profiles, which can take a lot of time. Precisely aims to take the time-consuming part out, but still maintain the helpful filters.

So instead of writing about who you are or what you want, you can choose to “activate” or include in your profile adjectives that the app provides in a ready-made list. For instance, you can choose descriptors like: “vegetarian,” “blonde,” “curvy,” “freckles,” “tattoos.”

The app provides a variety of personality-based filters in addition to physical descriptors, covering art, fitness, politics, diet and religion, for instance. If your religious or political views are important in your relationships, you can make your beliefs known to others. Or you can choose to not make them part of your filters.

Happn, a France-based dating app that uses geolocation to connect singles who cross paths in everyday life, has reached a major milestone: 10 million members.

The app works much like Tinder, but on a hyperlocal scale. When you walk by another user, their profile is added to the top of your feed. Every potential match you see was near you at some point during the day. The more you scroll, the further back in time you go. Tap a heart to like the profiles that catch your eye and dismiss the rest by tapping a cross. If there's a mutual match, you can start chatting for free.

“When we launched Happn in 2014, we aimed to fill a void in the online dating scene by offering a way for people to connect with those they’ve crossed paths with in real-life – and really, a way to put the spontaneity back into dating,” said co-founder and CEO Didier Rappaport, in a statement.

The strategy seems to be working. Happn is reportedly on track to reach 30 million users by the end of the year.

Millions of happy daters aren't the only big news for the app. Happn has also announced a new voice feature that will allow users to send audio recordings up to one minute long to each other. Happn hopes that the clips will make it easier for users to showcase their unique personalities before meeting up.

Rappaport said in a statement: "This new voice feature provides our members with another opportunity to connect on a more personal level and create meaningful relationships."

To use the new feature, click the mic icon that now appears inside a conversation chain. Hold the button down while recording and release it to finish. When it's complete, you can either send the message or cancel it. On the receiving end, a user simply needs to click on a recording to listen to it. The feature has already rolled out to all iOS and Android users.

Rappaport told Business Insider last November that a number of new features are planned for Happn in hopes of catching up with rival Tinder. "For us, the evolution of our product is really important," he said. "We want to make a service that is more and more rich for our users and one that allows them to express themselves much more."

"The voice is something that is very emotional," he continued. "Just listening to the voice of someone else can give you a lot of impression."

As for what else the future holds for Happn, we'll have to wait and see.

You might not have known this if you’ve used popular dating app Tinder, but the service secretly calculates a score that ranks the most (and least) desirable people swiping on the service.

And every single Tinder user has a score.

In an article for Fast Company, reporter Austin Carr was interviewing Tinder founder Sean Rad, who let him know this wasn’t some urban myth. In fact, Rad went so far as to admit that not only does each user have a desirability score, but that the company spent more than two months developing the algorithm for rating people. According to Rad, it’s more than a popularity contest of which users get the most swipes or matches, or who has the more attractive photos, but a combination of factors that make a more complex overall view.

Still, the swipes probably have something to do with your desirability score. In fact, every time a Tinder user swipes right or left on you, that is factored into the equation – how often you are liked, versus rejected. And how many times there is a mutual swipe, versus a one-sided rejection or like. Then there are the more intangible factors, like career choice, words used to describe oneself in a profile, and educational background.

Carr got to look at his own desirability score, which was just slightly above average to his dismay. He cautioned his readers to avoid looking at their scores, as they could potentially end up even more self-conscious daters than they were already. Tinder wouldn’t give him any details besides a top line number of how he compares to everyone else using the app. Tinder does have more detailed breakdowns and analyses, but they chose not to share.

While it might be interesting to learn your Tinder desirability score, it doesn’t help if you end up on the lower end of the spectrum. It certainly doesn’t mean anything in terms of your ability to connect with that one special person – people are attracted to one another based on that intangible known as chemistry, for one.

Also, people have a wide array of tastes – what might seem attractive to one Tinder user might turn off another. OkCupid discovered this in its own study, where it researched the most-messaged users. More often than not, the ones with more unusual features tended to get more messages, and more people considered them attractive compared to those who were considered more "ordinarily attractive."

So if you are on Tinder, just keep swiping and dating without worrying about how you stack up against the competition. It’s just an algorithm, after all. For more information on this dating app you can read our Tinder review.