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You can find love on Tinder for $500 a month, if you qualify for its elite tier
Tinder has rolled out its most exclusive subscription dubbed “Tinder Select,” according to a report by Bloomberg. This elite tier will cost love seekers $500 per month.
What's on TV this week: 'Mass Effect,' 'Love, Death & Robots' and 'Castlevania'
Also new this week: 'Subnautica: Below Zero,' 'Intergalactic' and 'Shrek' in 4K.
Hitting the Books: How to get a date online
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
Facebook Dating expands to Canada and Thailand
Facebook's quest to help singletons find love continues. After launching its Dating feature in Colombia in September, it's now rolling the service out to Canada and Thailand. And, presumably based on feedback from its Colombian users, it's adding a couple of new features.
Facebook's Dating feature aims to prevent harassment and dick pics
Where will you meet your next bae? If Facebook has anything to do with it, it'll be through its new dating feature, which it's now testing in Colombia. Announced back in May at the F8 developer's conference, Facebook wants to help its 200 million+ single users find more meaningful, deeper connections – and given its monopoly in online social interactions, it's pretty well-placed to do that.
Tinder Places matches you with people from your favorite hangouts
The science involved in making a match on Tinder is rudimentary at best: you can narrow your pool of potential baes by age and distance, and after that you're largely on your own, relying on carefully selected photographs and vague bios that reveal how your potential match "enjoys having fun", like every other human in the world. There's not a lot to work with before you get to the chatting stage. So Tinder is upping the ante with a new location-based feature, narrowing your prospects to those you cross paths with at your favourite bars, coffee shops and other hangouts.
'Florence' turns falling in love into a video game
Video games are good at war. For decades, games have covered the breadth, horror and honor of battle in every conceivable arena, from ancient history to futuristic space stations, from the hills of Mordor to the beaches of Normandy. Games have a long history of transforming firefights into sporting events, pitting players against one another with a wide array of weapons at their disposal. It makes sense, given where the industry started. "When our technology was really primitive, the easiest things to create were simulations of sports and of physical things and battles and sort of black-and-white conditions," Ken Wong, the creator of Monument Valley, says. "Since then we've developed so much technology and discussion, and we're able to create stories and characters with a lot of subtleties, but it feels like gaming as an industry is still hanging onto that past as sort of the true form of gaming."
Dating app Hinge ditches flings for relationships
Between Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid and the plethora of dating apps available, finding someone to hook up with has never been easier. But the endless supply of options has also made it much harder to connect with someone on a deeper, longer-lasting level. To tackle that problem, Hinge is rebuilding itself to focus on connecting people looking for relationships. It's also incorporating a new $7 monthly membership fee, in part to make sure that subscribers are actually invested in looking for relationships.
The After Math: Can't buy me love
There's something in the air this week. Seems everybody's in L-O-V-E, love. Well, except maybe this guy. Researchers successfully tested a new gene therapy using the DNA from three donors. Lenovo debuted the world's first Tango-enabled smartphone. Tinder kicked all the kids out and Google's gave its devs something to crow about. Numbers, because how else would we know that one is the loneliest?
Why did 'Layers of Fear' launch in the month of love?
The universe of human emotion is complex and dense, filled with wildly firing synapses and warring wavelengths. Some people embrace all-consuming feelings like love but shy away from adrenaline-pumping activities like skydiving or visiting a haunted house. Others love to be scared yet are terrified of love. Few understand these emotional inconsistencies better than Bloober Team. The studio released the heart-pounding horror game Layers of Fear on Feb. 16th, just two days after Valentine's Day -- and about three months after Halloween. "Paradoxically, we like to be scared," says Rafal Basaj, a spokesperson for the company. "Although we cannot say that we live in times devoid of problems and fears, but most of us rarely feel terrified and our bodies just need to remember how to react to fear. The horror genre gives us a way of filling that gap in a safe environment."
What's on your HDTV: 'Street Fighter 5,' 'Better Call Saul'
It's back! We could be talking about Street Fighter 5 or Better Call Saul and it still works. Somehow The Grammys tonight is being pushed back by those two debuts, while Hulu is already streaming the series premiere of 11.22.63. Of course, if you prefer Netflix, then just wait until Friday morning when it drops Judd Apatow's new series Love as well as Cooked. On Blu-ray we have Steve Jobs, and Xbox One owners can finally dive in to Rocket League, now featuring cars based on Halo and Gears of War. Look after the break to check out each day's highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).
The True Love Tinder Robot swipes based on your sweaty palms
We're not always honest with ourselves, especially when it comes to love -- and this is where the True Love Tinder Robot can lend a hand. It promises to read (and swipe) your true feelings via the electrical conductance, or uncontrollable sweatiness, of your palms. Think of it as a modern spin on the classic love-tester machine. If your body is interested in someone's picture on Tinder, this robot will know it and swipe right for you. If your palms stay relatively dry, the robot hand swipes left. It also provides basic, running commentary on your decisions.
In the App Store, love comes cheap
When you're a writer, people expect you to write. And when you're courting someone the pressure to write for them, and to do it well, is amplified. My most recent romantic conquest, a Mexican interior designer, lived in LA. He was a diehard romantic, hundreds of miles away, and despite a slight language barrier, he had a way with words that I struggled to match. He had the ability to make me melt with a single text. I, in turn, would sit for minutes at a time, wringing my heart and brain for just one drop of sweet sentiment.
Tinder hopes its new features will improve your odds
'Super likes' be damned, Tinder is fleshing out its addictively swipey profile cards with more information aimed at connecting you with the person of your dreams / evening. As well as "intelligently" adding relevant information (including work history and education) on each suitor's audition card, the matching-making app says it's improved its learning algorithm to "drive more compatible matches." Machine learning will assess what Tinder users have been doing with the app to create an algorithm to help improve the chances of love. How exactly that'll help your odds, when everyone will still be swiping in one direction or another, remains to be seen -- we've asked Tinder for clarification.
Tinder gets a lo-fi makeover in 'Millennial Swipe Simulator 2015'
If you've been using Tinder for long enough chances are that you've opened the app in the morning with some rather surprising matches. Brainlessly swiping right on whoever fits the bill for you in the hopes that they'll do the same and you'll potentially have a love connection is part of the experience. It's this sort of activity the web-based Millennial Swipe Sim 2015 aims to replicate. In the "game" you have to keep swiping (regardless of direction) to keep your boredom meter from filling lest you die. Seriously. Funnily enough, developer Will Herring (a Buzzfeed creative director and former GamePro (R.I.P.) editor) managed sneaking some of the app's quirks in. Like people in group photos and the same profiles that keep popping up repeatedly, for example. What's missing though are wedding shots from the altar or church steps and profiles consisting entirely of photos of one's children. Maybe in the next update?
Breaking up in the time of Twitter
For nearly 10 years, we shared everything, but it never occurred to me that sharing a four-digit PIN could ruin it all.
Speedrunners get engaged on Awesome Games Done Quick
They met on Twitch, so getting engaged on Twitch is wonderfully romantic. While blasting through a cutscene in the Nintendo 64 game Mischief Makers, Awesome Games Done Quick speedrunner Jackafur took a moment to thank his friends for their support over the years, and then he turned his attention to Kittyrawr, his girlfriend seated right next to him. He said he would love her forever, pulled out a ring, got on one knee and popped the question – and she said yes, all live on Twitch. Onions, guys. Onions. Awesome Games Done Quick has so far raised more than $500,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and last year the group raised more than $1 million for Prevent Cancer. They're streaming through January 10 – watch it live right here. [Image: Awesome Games Done Quick]
Arrivederci: WhatsApp cited in 40 percent of adulterous Italian divorces
Technology can bring people together... and tear them apart, apparently. The Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers claims that WhatsApp chats are cited as evidence in 40 percent of Italian divorce cases where cheating is involved. Reportedly, a lot of these less-than-faithful spouses can't help but message their lovers, whether it's to whisper sweet nothings or send sexy photos. In some cases, lawyers say they've seen people juggle "three or four" partners through WhatsApp at one time -- probably not how the developers pictured people using their service.
OKCupid test lets you choose nearly any sexual identity
If you don't conform to historical definitions of gender or sexual orientation, online dating can be tough. You frequently have to shoehorn yourself into a category where you aren't comfortable, and you'll probably get many unwelcome advances. OKCupid should soon have a fix, however: it's testing an update that dramatically expands the range of identities you can associate with your dating profile. You can declare yourself as gender non-conforming or pansexual, for example, rather than having to choose from binary options like male/female or heterosexual/gay. The site is only showing the new options to a subset of its users and hasn't said if or when they'll be available to everyone, but it might not be long before you'll have an easier time finding partners that accept who you are. [Image credit: Alamy]
Tinder's paid tier will let you undo costly dating mistakes
So you're furiously swiping left in Tinder to get rid of bad matches, only to realize that you accidentally dismissed a total dreamboat. Are you going to be stuck lamenting the romance that might have been? Not if you're using Tinder's upcoming paid tier. The dating firm tells TechCrunch that its Plus service will include an "undo" feature that lets you revisit date candidates you'd previously ruled out. Just how much this (and the previously mentioned away-from-home browsing) will cost you is up in the air. Tinder will test Plus with a portion of its users in the UK, Brazil and Germany, with prices ranging anywhere from 99 cents to $20; the official rollout will depend on what customers are willing to pay. Either way, you won't have to risk spending the night at home just because you were too quick to skip a potential partner.
