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Premium Tinder features will help you find love before hitting a new city
If you don't count buying a few drinks or other niceties, finding love on Tinder is essentially free, but it looks like that'll change come next month. The app's CEO and cofounder Sean Rad recently teased at Forbes' Under 30 event that new features will be added that users have apparently been clamoring for. What's more, he thinks they'll offer enough value that a specific subset of its user-base will be willing to pay for them. The core experience of swiping left or right on potential matches to like or dislike, respectively, won't see any fees tacked on, but an ability to expand your Tinder reach beyond your current location and into other cities is coming in November. Perfect for striking up conversations before you start traveling, it'd seem. As you'll see in the video below, Rad isn't keen to say just how much this will cost as of now, only that monetizing these "hacks" will allow the outfit to reinvest in itself. With how the application has handled location data in the past, however, let's hope this turns out for the best.
'Siren' dating app wants to keep women safe from creeps
While Tinder solves a few of the problems women face with online dating -- like being smothered with lascivious messages from anyone and everyone -- there's still an issue of privacy that it fails to address. That risk of not being nearly as anonymous while looking for a mate as one would hope is what inspired Seattle's Susie Lee to create Siren. What sets it apart from every other dating app is that it keeps a woman's picture private until she deems it appropriate to share with a possible suitor. As Seattle Times notes, a lady can peruse the profiles of men at their leisure and if, say, she's into a guy's answer to questions like what their three magic-lamp wishes are, she can then show him her picture. The idea is to give ladies the control here and base matches on real-world personality, not a dry series of surveys akin to eHarmony.
Online dating leads to more break-ups than meeting in real life
Online dating has reached the point where it isn't weird to say you met someone via the internet anymore. Tinder is another story, but that's a digression for a different day. However, while sites like eHarmony and Match are quick to espouse their success rates (the former claims that 438 members marry every day) it turns out their data, much like OKCupid, might not be telling the whole truth. A recent joint-study (PDF) conducted by Michigan State University and Stanford found that people who met online weren't as likely to stay together for the long haul as their offline-matched counterparts. The separation and divorce rates for folks who'd paired up online was much higher than their offline compatriots, and more online-founded relationships tended to end within a year after the survey. Is Online Better Than Offline For Meeting Partners? states that those who met on the web were more likely to date than actually marry compared to people that'd met IRL, too -- by more than double.
OKCupid treats your love life like a lab rat
Facebook is perhaps the most prominent example, but the internet, whether we want to accept it or not, is a gigantic data-mining operation where every thing about us is monitored, measured and experimented with -- even our love life, should we choose. The folks over at online-dating service OKCupid (OKC) have recently detailed, among other things, how they futzed with the site's match-percentage system to see if it'd affect users' messaging habits. To start, OKC wanted to see just how much bearing system had on the likelihood of sending one message. When the service took two people who were actually 30 percent compatible and fudged the numbers by, say, 60 points, the amount of first messages sent naturally increased. As the OKTrends blog notes, that's exactly what was expected because that's how the site's users have more or less been trained; a higher number means a potentially better match. But, as anyone who's used the site can probably attest, one message doesn't mean a whole lot.
Study suggests internet will become number one matchmaker
"Love is a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is... hold on, email." -- Anonymous Since we can't presume all Engadget readers regularly attend their NPR All Things Considered listening parties, here's something you might've missed this week. In a segment on the growing trend in online matchmaking, Jennifer Ludden cited a research from Stanford University's Michael Rosenfeld that seems to fall in line exactly where we'd expect: it's really easy to be yourself and find matching partners when you have the ability to reach out to strangers who present so much personal information from the get-go. More specifically, the study found almost one-fourth of couples met online -- a number that jumps to 61 percent if you single out (no pun intended) same-sex couples -- and it's growing at a pace that it' "may soon become the No. 1 way Americans find a mate." For now, however, it's ranked second, just above meeting at bars / restaurants and below the classic, meeting through friends who just love tricking you into bad blind dates with the "great personality" line anyway. Make sure you have the right camera just in case.
