Tinder

File this one under “Not a surprise.” IAC/InterActiveCorp – owner of Match, OkCupid, Tinder, and more – has released its fourth quarter 2013 financial results, and things are looking good almost all the way across the bar.

IAC’s performance was strong in Q4 2013. Match closed up the year well with 12% revenue growth and 21% OIBA (Operating Income Before Amortization) growth in the fourth quarter. Total revenue for Q4 2013 was $203.9M, up from $182.6M in Q4 2012. For the year, Match grew revenue 10.5% and OIBA 16%, and the company predicts an even better year of growth in 2014.

After pulling out of European markets to focus on the United States in 2009, Match has managed to successfully grow in the US as well as across the globe. The company doesn’t hesitate to call itself “the unquestioned global leader in dating,” with 30 million active users and 3.4 million paying subscribers in 2013.

Core, Meetic and Developing revenues grew 4%, 8% and 69%, respectively, to $115.7 million, $58.9 million and $29.4 million. That growth was driven by an increase in subscribers and as well as the contribution of mobile app Twoo, which was not in the prior year period. On the whole, profits increased due to higher revenue and lower customer acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue.

The most interesting source of IAC’s potential growth is Tinder, the rapidly growing social dating app primarily owned by IAC. Tinder clocked in at 100M daily profile views in August 2013, and is expected to hit 1B daily profile views in April. That’s some serious swiping. Although Tinder's implied valuation today is low, it could prove to be worth more than IAC's current market cap of $6.4B.

Even for IAC’s traditional dating sites, mobile has been big. 50% of all communication for Match.com US is sent from mobile devices. At OkCupid, the number rises to over 60%. Those numbers were single digits as recently as 2010, and IAC says it has just barely scratched the surface where optimization for geo-specific features and mobile markets are concerned.

2014 promises to be full of mobile product enhancements across the board, so IAC expects to see even greater engagement and customer acquisition resulting from smartphones. These are the kind of changes that allow IAC’s portfolio to continuously thrive, despite the changing world around it. The future looks predictably bright for the company.

Bad news for Tinder fans: all those creepy people you've been avoiding on the app may now know exactly where you are.

It turns out the dating app suffered from a bug for most of last year that would've allowed hackers to determine the exact location of its users. And Tinder chose to cover it up until just a few weeks ago. The information security firm Include Security exposed the security vulnerability in mid-February, saying that anyone with the right kind of knowledge could "get the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for any Tinder user" provided that the app was running.

Hello, major privacy violation!

The company confirmed that "anyone with rudimentary programming skills could query the Tinder API directly and pull down the coordinates of any user." From that API data, it is then possible to triangulate the exact location of the user with a very high degree of accuracy. We're talking within 100 feet. And remember that part where they said "rudimentary programming skills?" So not only can creeps get incredibly close to you, they don't even have to be smart creeps in order to do it.

So much for the fun of all that mindless swiping.

It’s a bad bug, for sure, but before you go cursing the day Tinder hit the app-mosphere, Include Security also noted in an FAQ on its disclosure blog post that these flaws can be "common place in the mobile app space" and will “continue to remain common if developers don't handle location information more sensitively." Is that more comforting or less comforting? I'm not actually sure…

What I am sure of is that Tinder should not have failed to disclose the vulnerability when it was privately reported. Users deserved to know that the security of their location data was potentially compromised, even though the bug was fixed sometime between December and January.

Your questions now are probably "Has anyone actually exploited this?” and “Can I tell if someone has tracked me using this privacy vulnerability?" According to Include Security’s post, “there is no simple way to determine if this attack was used against a specific Tinder user." In other words, nope – you have no way of knowing if that slightly unbalanced-looking person you just rejected is about to come knocking at your door.

Good luck sleeping (or swiping) with that on your mind.

See a demo of the Tinder vulnerability at work:

“They both swiped right. (For professional purposes, that is.)”

That’s how TIME describes the meeting of Sean Rad and Justin Mateen during the first semester of their freshman year at University of Southern California in 2004. At the time they were both working on their own businesses, but soon enough they joined forces and became co-founders of mobile dating’s most impressive success story so far: Tinder.

In just 17 months, Tinder has become a phenomenon. “For the uninitiated,” writes TIME, “Tinder is a smartphone app that at first seems like a higher tech version of ‘hot or not.’ Users are shown photos of nearby potential matches and can swipe right to ‘like’ and left for ‘nope.’” It's now getting 600 million swipes per day from its obsessive 18-24 year-old userbase, and landed two of its founding team on the Forbes 2013 “30 Under 30” list.

Why did it become so big, so fast? Because traditional dating sites require extended periods of time and attention spent filling out and browsing long profiles, and in our speedy modern era we no longer have time for that kind of commitment. Tinder can be played – because yes, it is a game – in short bursts on the go, making it the most convenient way to meet your match currently on the scene.

Tinder snagged TechCrunch’s Crunchie award for best new startup on February 10, 2014, an honor it fully deserved for its mind-boggling success in 2013. There's no doubt that Tinder is the hottest thing on the mobile market right now, but the question is: can it maintain its success in the future?

“Nobody joins Tinder because they’re looking for something,” Rad told TIME. “They join because they want to have fun. It doesn’t even matter if you match because swiping is so fun.” So with fun in mind, the Tinder team plans to extend their reach beyond dating. The plan is for the app to evolve into a social discovery service, one that’s useful for meeting people beyond the romantic context.

“You’ll be able to eventually interact with friends for other purposes,” Mateen said. “So even if you’re in a relationship you’re going to be able to find good value in Tinder in the coming months.” The problems encountered when connecting with someone new are universal, whether you’re meeting someone with romantic, professional, or friendly intentions, and Tinder hopes to help.

Other plans for the future of the app include an updated communication system that goes beyond text messaging and further international expansion.

According to a recent study aiming to find the most desirable single in 2014, you'll have the most luck if you're 25 years old and rich.

The study pooled information from about 81,000 singles between the ages of 25-35 on the dating website Plenty of Fish, along with about 1.8 million messages to see what traits were the most desirable in both men and women who are online dating.

For both sexes, men and women in their twenties received more messages than those in their thirties. Women who were between 25 and 26 years old received the most messages, with a sharp decline once they turned 33.

It seems that both men and women prefer singles who make money. Women who earned between $50,000-$75,000 and men who earned between $75,000-$150,000 attracted more prospective dates than those earning less. And men who have law degrees are also likely to be the most successful in garnering attention online, with 33% more messages than the average single guy.

While data like this paints a certain picture of online dating, it's good to keep in mind that this is information gathered from only one online dating site and from just one demographic. If we were to look at online dating as a whole, the fastest-growing segment is singles over 50. And many people prefer paid dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony because daters tend to be more serious if they buy a subscription.

Free dating sites have always skewed younger, because many young daters aren't interested in serious relationships and want a chance to meet a lot of people. Paid dating sites tend to attract users of all ages who are on different levels of the dating spectrum - from casual to marriage-minded.

Twenty-somethings are also gravitating towards dating apps rather than online dating sites. Apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Are You Interested have been on the rise, mostly because of the ease of creating a profile and meeting people immediately, whereas most online dating sites require a little more effort and time before you're meeting each other face-to-face.

So while the POF study might feed into the stereotypes that persist about online dating (that singles prefer if you're young, earn a lot of money, etc.) - there are in reality a wide variety of singles who are online dating. Don't be afraid to explore a number of dating sites and see which one works best for you. This is the best time of year to do it, since more people than ever are online dating!

It's a question I hadn't given much thought to (and I'm guessing I'm not the only one) until Slate posted it: Why don't single sitcom characters date online? Everyone and their mother (quite literally) is doing it in real life, so why haven't televisions shows jumped on the bandwagon?

Earlier this month, The Mindy Project used mobile dating as a marketing device. Tinder users swiping through profiles could come across two fictional characters from the show, which would then direct to videos promoting the sitcom if they made a match. It's was a clever marketing gimmick, and relatively unobtrusive for a generation of people who have grown accustomed to seeing ads everywhere. But it begs the question: why is Mindy on Tinder, but Tinder isn't on The Mindy Project?

"In two seasons of casual dating," writes Amanda Hess for Slate, "Mindy's been set up on a blind date; she's met suitors on the subway, in her office building, in the hospital, and on the street; and she once even unwittingly employed the services of a male escort. But she's yet to locate a date through her phone." New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, and Parks and Recreation have all featured online dating, but only as a one-off, single episode gimmick.

What gives? In real life, we'd be looking for love online or on our phones at least once an episode, not once in an entire series. Could it somehow be that we're doing away with the online dating stigma everywhere but on television? Are sitcoms just totally out of touch with modern dating?

Slate says there's another way of looking at it: "Sitcoms and dating sites are both built to organize our messy romantic lives by corralling our desires into neat narratives. Sitcoms offer an unrealistic version of modern singledom, but so do online dating services." Sitcom characters have a team of writers controlling the narrative structure of their dating lives, while those of us who live nonfictional lives require technology companies to provide a script for us.

Expect to see more online dating on your screen soon, however. Bravo plans to launch a show called "Online Dating Rituals of the American Male" in spring. The series will follow a cast of men in their search for love (or whatever else they're looking for) online. The hope is that it will provide an insider's perspective on the male psyche and dating in the digital age.

Being on Bravo, it's bound to be a sensationalized, over the top, drama fest of a show, but maybe it's still a step in the right direction.

Much has been said about online dating's transition from stigmatized service used only in the shadows to full-blown pop culture trend. The term "meteoric" has never been more appropriate. Online dating's rise to total world domination has been unprecedented...and we might have mobile to thank for that.

With the equally meteoric rise of mobile dating, online dating has become a social activity - one that people are happy to discuss in public in a way they've never been before. Tinder turned public perception of online dating on its head, especially for the young people who primarily make up its userbase.

It's not unusual to see friends using the app together, sharing images and messages amongst the group, or sending each other screenshots of especially notable Tinder chats. It's what people talk about on the bus, what they use to pass the time while waiting in long lines, and what they turn to when they're feeling awkward at a party. The online service is rapidly becoming integrated into our offline lives, and no one is embarrassed about it.

Though all online daters have benefited from the attitude adjustment that came along with Tinder, one group may be discovering some very important bonus benefits: women. Traditional thinkers say that women only want relationships - they're not interested in casual dating and would never judge someone on appearances alone. Yet 45% of Tinder users are women, and they seem perfectly comfortable with the app's low-commitment approach to relationships and reliance on physical appearance.

Tinder's non-profile profile offers up very little information (all culled from Facebook) about users, meaning it disproves a second common stereotype: that, unlike superficial men, women require detailed information about men before deciding if they're interested. The stripped down profile also prevents users from feeling exposed in an uncomfortable way they might on an online dating site. If you haven't spent hours on a meticulously crafted profile that digs into the heart of the "real you," rejection hardly feels like rejection.

There's also the message problem. Female users on online dating sites are famously bombarded with messages from admirers, an overwhelming experience that turns many off from online dating as a whole. But Tinder users can only receive messages from people they've indicated an interest in, and the app doesn't allow users to send photos (meaning unsolicited scandalous pics are kept at bay). It's a perfect solution.

And then there's the final plus of Tinder: it's fun. It manages to be silly, exciting, intriguing, and socially acceptable at the same time. Online dating has yet to crack that code.