Types (Niche)

Dating app Coffee Meets Bagel has taken a back seat to the spectacular rise of Tinder the past few years. This however has not daunted the company’s founders, three sisters who left their cushy corporate jobs to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams. (Not to mention, they wanted to create a dating app that they would like to use!)

Now, the company has taken its carefully executed roll-out in the U.S. and is expanding internationally. Hong Kong was the first place outside of the U.S. where the service was launched.

CMB takes its operations seriously. Instead of giving in to the “more is more” trend in dating - offering unlimited looks at profiles and encouraging users to choose “yes” or “no” in a matter of seconds – this dating app offers users one match per day. And you have 24 hours to mull it over, choosing to like or pass. If you like, you have a week to make a real date happen through the app’s private chat line, or it’s on to the next. In other words, it forces users to carefully consider and follow through, instead of swiping at will and sending a few messages that never lead to a date.

Facebook is a key platform in spreading interest in the app overseas, since Hong Kong users (according to a recent article in Forbes) have an average of 768 Facebook friends each, eight times the worldwide standard. Also, Hong Kong is a highly social city, although people spend more time at work than they do trying to meet people to date. It made for the perfect place to launch the dating app’s international roll-out.

Co-Founder Dawoon Kang lived in Hong Kong for three years, experiencing the dating scene for herself. (She and her current boyfriend met over CMB). “Hong Kong is a very young, vibrant city full of ambitious singles in their 20s and 30s who are eager to meet new people but have very little time for it. Coffee Meets Bagel was designed with these young professionals in mind, which made Hong Kong our perfect market – and our initial results show that,” she told Forbes.

On average, Hong Kong users are logging in 4.3 times per day (33% more than U.S. members), and 72% log in each day to check their matches. Like in the U.S., more CMB members are female – 62% of the Hong Kong user base are women, although there are more single men overall in China.

The service launched in Hong Kong on March 4^th, and before the month was over, the company had made 3,000 connections. According to Kang, CMB has also achieved consistent 20 percent week on week growth.

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

Real talk about Tinder: it can be a frustrating, maybe even scary, place to be a woman sometimes.

In fact, any online dating site fits that description. The entire Internet fits that description. Give people an anonymous username to hind behind, and suddenly all their worst behavior is on full display. I'm not saying it's everyone, but it's enough people to make it a serious problem.

Normally serious problems require serious solutions, but a California-based programmer decided to take a more humorous approach.

According to The Verge, the unnamed programmer tweaked Tinder's API, turning it into “a catfish machine that fools men into thinking they’re talking to women – when in fact they’re talking with each other.” He began by creating bait profiles, one using the image of a popular vlogger and the other using the image of a friend who gave her consent.

He then developed a program to identify men who indicate interest in one of the bait profiles. Once it finds two, the program matches them to each other and lets them begin the awkward, hilarious process of striking up a conversation. Within minutes of activation, the program was hard at work.

The programmer – who The Verge calls “Patrick” – estimates he witnessed 40 conversations within the first 12 hours. He developed a code to scramble phone numbers and stepped in if a real world meeting was in the cards, but says he feels torn about the ethics of his prank.

"They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he told The Verge. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Patrick's prank was inspired by his female friends who often complained about their interactions on Tinder. His first plan was to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every first message received by a female friend, but after looking into Tinder's API, he discovered it had few protections and his vision grew.

"Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he says. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person."

Patrick is far from the first to reveal the weakness of Tinder's API, but he's certainly the funniest and most socially relevant. Other hacks can be and have been used for morally ambiguous, or even dangerous, purposes. This one is good for a few laughs and makes a valid, important point about the way we treat each other online.

To read some of the priceless exchanges, check out the original post on The Verge. Check out our review of Tinder for more about the dating app.

For most people, Tinder is, at best, a chance to find a date and, at worst, an amusing diversion when standing in line or when there's nothing good on Netflix. But for artist and hacker Matthew Rothenberg, Tinder is an opportunity for an art project.

The project is called Swipe Left, and in it he inserts imagery of drone strikes and drone strike victims into the dating app. “For most of my career I've explored how real people and communities interact with technology,” Rothenberg writes on his website, “and all the messy things that happen when they do.”

That's exactly what this project does, although “messy” is a strong understatement. Rothenberg drew a complex connection between Tinder use and drone strikes. “The interface of Tinder is consciously reductionist,” he writes on Medium. “You get a name, age, and (sometimes) a very brief bio. The decision tree is binary: yes or no (or in Tinder UI, swipe right or left). No winks, nudges, or ratings. No bookmarking to come back later for decision. You have to make a decision in order to move on.”

Every decision made on Tinder is final. Accidentally swipe left on the love of your life, and they're gone for good. But, Tinder reminds you, there's a new potential love waiting just on the other side of that swipe. They're available immediately. There's no time for regret, remorse, reflection – the cycle continues instantly, and users are left feeling fine about the fact that they just reduced an incredibly complex thing – love – to a painfully simple activity.

And then there's drone strikes. Part of the reason they are so controversial is “the sense of dehumanized technology,” Rothenberg says. The kill list looks remarkably similar to something else: a list of members who meet a series of criteria, a photo, their age, a brief bio. In the end it's a simple binary decision. Yes or no. Swipe right or swipe left.

In both cases, the computer mediated user interface provides a distancing barrier between the viewer and an action. The barrier creates a sense of separation and encourages quick action. So what happens when New Yorkers find “drone strikes images interspersed with their continuous yes-and-no swiping to Tinder matches of shirtless-ab-photos and Instagram-filtered-art-selfies taken in the MoMA rain room?”

Well, the “what” isn't actually important, according to Rothenberg. He is uninterested in which way people swipe, merely the fact that they have to swipe. “How viewers choose to react is far less interesting to me than the fact that they’ve been forced into this situation to begin with,” he says. Any reaction at all is a valid and interesting data point for the Swipe Left project.

To help promote the global launch of Tinder Plus, co-founder and soon-to-be former CEO Sean Rad has been in the news a lot lately. Recently, he hopped on Reddit to answer questions from the general public about Tinder, the launch of its new premium service, and what’s next for the company.

Because of the recent backlash about Tinder Plus, people were interested in the reasons behind the pricing of the new service - $9.99 for those under 30, and for those 30 and older, $19.99. According to Rad, “months of testing and thought went into the feature and price mix for Tinder Plus. We tested a broad range of prices and found that users that saw value in Tinder Plus were more than willing to pay at the existing price points.” He goes on to talk about Passport and Rewind, the two most-requested features offered in the new service, which allow you to check out people in other cities and also to reconsider someone you rejected before.

Rad also fielded questions on whether the app creates feelings of rejection – after all, you can be rejected with one swipe in less than a second on Tinder. Rad countered this question by explaining how Tinder works. People won’t know that you liked them unless they swipe right on your profile. “We call this the ‘double opt-in.’ Even if you don’t match with another user, there’s no certainty that they saw your profile.”

Tinder’s history holds a series of lucky accidents – for one, it was almost named Matchbox. The first version of the app didn’t even have swiping, Tinder’s signature feature. Co-Founder Jonathan Badeen explains: “I snuck it in a few weeks later and told everybody after it was released that they could swipe. The swipe was born out of a desire to mimic real life interactions with a card stack. When organizing cards you put them into piles. Swiping right fittingly throws the card in the direction of the matches…The swipe just made sense in this case and seems stupid simple in retrospect.”

One of the participants asked how the founders came up with the idea of Tinder, to which Rad replied: “…we had this obsession with breaking down the barriers in meeting people around you. We noticed that people grew closer to their small groups of friends but grew farther apart from the rest of the world in the process. We knew that if we could simply take the fear out of meeting someone, that we could bring the people closer together. And we've done just that.”

Please read our Tinder review for more information on this popular dating app.

Since 1987, South by Southwest's annual film, interactive, and music festivals and conferences in Austin have become an increasingly bigger deal. These days it's one of the biggest festivals in America, and with that comes all the exciting excesses you would expect.

It's no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to expect that online dating explodes in Austin during that time, particularly location-based services like Tinder. This year's SXSW has indeed seen a flurry of activity related to online dating, but it isn't making a splash in the ways you'd think.

Meet Ava, a seemingly normal 25-year-old who turned out not to be normal after all. In fact, she simply turned out not to be. Ava was a Tinder bot created to promote a sci-fi thriller, Ex Machina, that premiered at the festival. An Adweek staff member wrote about his encounter with Ava in an intriguingly named piece called Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She's Not What She Appears.

Ava was capable of having a conversation via the app, but as soon as she directed users to her Instagram, it was clear that something was off. There was just one photo and one video, both promoting Ex Machina. The link in her bio went to the movie's website. And the woman in the photo is a Swedish actress, who just happens to play a role in the film.

On one hand, it's pretty invasive and – yes – pretty spammy. No doubt “Ava” pissed plenty of SXSW-goers off. On the other hand, it's also kind of brilliant. It ties in perfectly with the concept of the film - “she's a bot in the movie, so of course she's a bot on Tinder.”

And that's not the only example of online dating being a big news story at SXSW. Dating app Quiver turned heads with a “Stop The Robot” protest at the festival. On most online dating sites, users are matched via some kind of algorithm. On Quiver, on the other hand, humans help by matching users they think would be good fits.

“Since the idea behind Quiver is to rely on users rather than artificial intelligence,” writes International Business Times, the team behind it held a fake protest outside the Austin Convention Center to “highlight the dangers of tech – and get some good PR, of course.”

Protesters at the faux-demonstration sported shirts promoting Stop The Robots, an alleged organization (but in fact just a website) raising awareness about the dangers artificial intelligence and other advanced tech could pose to humans. They carried signs with slogans like “Stop the AI threat,” “Robots won't care” and “Humans are the future.”

Who knows whether these publicity stunts convert into actual business, but they're certainly fun for the spectator.