NY TIMES – Sep 6 – People don’t think of themselves as a walking, talking set of scores. We can be scored these days for our quality and disposition as a taxi passenger. Uber's taxi drivers scores its passengers. Uber has said the two-way ratings are about “maintaining an excellent experience for both the rider and the driver.” This can be interpreted in two ways: Uber can use the ratings to avoid certain passengers, or the ratings could inspire customers to refine their behavior. Klout measures your influence on social media. A matchmaking service Tawkify is going to use Klout scores to connect people with similar levels of influence. You can imagine scenarios in which employers, insurers and prospective in-laws start to employ the scores as proxies for your character.
Category: Outlets – New York Times
Socialbots Can Flirt And Tweet
NY TIMES – Aug 13 – From the earliest days of the Internet, robotic programs, or bots, have been trying to pass themselves off as human. Chatbots greet users when they enter an online chat room, spambots churn out e-mails advertising miracle stocks and unattended bank accounts in Nigeria. Bimbots deploy photos of gorgeous women to hawk work-from-home job ploys and illegal pharmaceuticals. Now come socialbots, programmed to tweet and retweet. This new breed of bots is being designed to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people. Last year, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500M. Some researchers estimate that ~35% of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. Within two years, ~10 % of activity occurring on social networks will be masquerading bots, according to technology researchers. Dating sites provide especially fertile ground for socialbots. Christian Rudder, a co-founder and GM of OkCupid, said that when his site recently bought and redesigned a smaller site, they witnessed not just a sharp decline in bots, but also a sudden 15% drop in use of the new site by real people. This decrease in traffic occurred because the flirtatious messages and automated “likes” that bots had been posting to members’ pages had imbued the former site with a false sense of intimacy and activity. Mr. Rudder and his programmers are seeking to design their own bots that will flirt with invader bots, courting them into a special room, “a purgatory of sorts,” to talk to one another rather than fooling the humans.
by Ian Urbina
See full article at NY Times
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
Government Matchmaking Events In South Korea
NY TIMES – Aug 6 – In South Korea, the Ministry of Health and Welfare began promoting the idea of dating parties in 2010. Under the enthusiastic leadership of its minister at the time, Cheon Jae-hee, it held four parties that year that brought together its workers and employees at local corporations. Since then, sponsorship of the parties has shifted mainly to ministry affiliates and local governments, which can win financial rewards for activities that promote marriage and childbirth. One government-financed agency, the Planned Population Federation of Korea, claims a different kind of victory: by hosting parties, it is working to undo its past success when it encouraged vasectomies as a booming South Korea feared being held back by population growth. Corporations, fearing critical shortages of workers in an aging society, have begun ending informal bans against office romances, with some now paying for dating services for their workers. In 2011, the average age of a first marriage for South Korean women hit 29.14, up from 24.8 in 1990; for men it jumped to 31.8 from 27.9 in 1990. The birthrate sunk to 1.15 children per woman, the lowest among the world’s most developed countries.
by Su-Hyun Lee
See full article at NY Times
Hooking Up On Campus
NY TIMES – July 17 – Traditional dating in college has been replaced by “hooking up”, and it is not driven by men only. Young women are propelling it, too. Nationally, women now outnumber men in college enrollment by 4 to 3. Some researchers have argued that the gender imbalance fosters a culture of hooking up because men, as the minority, hold more power in the sexual marketplace, and they prefer casual sex to long-term relationships. According to a 2007 survey funded by the Justice Department ~14% of women were sexually assaulted in college; most were drunk or drugged. Paula England, a NYU sociologist, surveyed 24K students. Her "Online College Social Life Survey", said that women tended to fare much better sexually in relationships than in hookups. By senior year 40% of students are virgins or have had intercourse with only one person. Women from wealthier backgrounds were much more likely to hook up.
by Kate Taylor
See full article at NY Times
Parents Play Matchmakers
NY TIMES – May 9 – “It’s almost like outsourcing your online dating to your mom,” said Kevin Leland, CEO of TheJMom.com, a Jewish matchmaking site. Mothers, fathers and even grandmothers share online profiles of their ready-to-wed children. Duo is a traditional matchmaking service based in South Korea. 80% of the members are mothers inquiring on behalf of their sons. Annual fees can range from $2K – $5K, and include 7-9 introductions and parents monitor the dating progress of their children. Posting and browsing on TheJMom.com is free, and a six-month subscription package, which provides contacts and connections, starts at $78. The $199 premium service, the Personal Profile Concierge, provides mothers with a makeover of their own profile and their child’s online profile and one-on-one attention from someone at the company. Indian families are known to begin the matchmaking process by collecting a prospect’s “bio-data,” which is a résumé of someone’s marital qualifications — from the basics like age, weight and height, to information about a prospect’s job and character. There are a number of matrimonial sites including BharatMatrimony.com, Shaadi.com, and SecondShaadi.com (for second marriages).
by Ji Huyn Lee
See full article at NY Times
See all posts on TheJMom See all posts on BharatMatrimony
See all posts on Shaadi See all posts on SecondShaadi
Many Parents Disapprove Of Indian Dating Sites
NY TIMES – Apr 23 – A new generation of young Indian professionals has refused to follow the arranged-marriage route, with its emphasis on caste, family ties, wealth and skin color. Parents, while trying to respect their children’s wishes, are trying other measures, like online singles networks such as Floh and TwolyMadlyDeeply. Floh has 500 members, some parents paid $300 annual subscription on their kids’ behalf. Online matchmaking sites have been around in India for quite some time, like Shaadi.com or Bharatmatrimony.com, but they are long shot in a country of a billion-plus people. Many parents disapprove of Indian dating sites as they have a highly skewed to males, and can be crammed with unverified identities. Singles networks like Floh and TwolyMadlyDeeply, with their “verified” memberships, appeal to parents because they promise the exact opposite of digital anonymity. TwolyMadlyDeeply’s members are vetted on the phone before they can join and can only then interact online or through real-time events.
Grindr’s Appeal Is Its Simplicity
NY TIMES – Mar 10 – Grindr is approaching its fourth anniversary and has amassed ~5M users who spend ~90 minutes each day using the app. Billions of messages fly across the service every year, and 76% of the company’s revenue comes from money generated by Grindr premium users. Jamie Woo, author of the book, Meet Grindr, How One App Changed the Way We Connect, says Grindr’s main purpose is to facilitate hookups that are “spontaneous and intimate". He said the primary appeal of Grindr is its simplicity. The app also focuses on proximity rather than location.
You May Now Kiss The Computer Screen
Tinder, A Dating App With A Difference
NY TIMES – Feb 27 – Tinder, a new mobile dating app lets users swipe through profile pictures, tapping a green heart when they like what they see and pressing a red “x” when they don’t. Any time a user “likes” a member who has also liked him or her back, the apps declares a match and introduces the two in a private chat room. Although the app requires connecting through Facebook, it is cleverly discreet. It shows users only friends of friends, avoiding potentially awkward run-ins. Its founders say the app is downloaded ~20K times each day and to date they’ve made 20M matches through the service. It was born out of Hatch Labs, an incubator financed by IAC/InterActiveCorp, and became a stand-alone company in January.
A Match Made In The Code
NY TIMES – Feb 11 – eHarmony’s senior research scientist, Gian C.
Gonzaga, went to the big annual meeting of the Society for Personality
and Social Psychology, held recently in New Orleans. He said its newest
algorithm matches couples by focusing on six factors:
– Level of agreeableness
– Preference for closeness with a partner
– Degree of sexual and romantic passion
– Level of extroversion and openness to new experience
– How important spirituality is
– How optimistic and happy each one is
The more similarly that two people score in these factors, the
better their chances, Dr. Gonzaga said. His assertion left the critics
slightly intrigued but quite unconvinced. Similarity components are
notoriously weak at accounting for relationship satisfaction,” said Paul
W. Eastwick of the University of Texas, Austin. “For example, what
really matters for my relationship satisfaction is whether I myself am
neurotic and, to a slightly lesser extent, whether my partner is
neurotic. Our similarity on neuroticism is irrelevant.”