NY TIMES – Dec 26 – Meet at the Airport.com asks users to include the name of their local airport, the time they’ll be there or the location and time that they’ll be at any other terminal in the world. The site connects travelers with one another for friendship, love or something in between. Women who are traveling alone but don’t necessarily want to eat alone can scour Inviteforabite.com for public invitations from other female travelers. Triptrotting.com connects travelers with locals for advice and activities like bike riding in Beijing or a photo tour of New York landmarks. On Globetrooper.com, users can post a trip they’re planning and invite strangers to join. Banjo, an app for iPhone, uses location technology to facilitate spontaneous meetups while you’re on the go. Its creator, Damien Patton, came up with the idea after learning that while in an airport he missed connecting with a friend he hadn’t seen in years. Planely.com matches you with fellow airline passengers, allowing you to connect with them on the Web before you connect in the air.
Category: Reporters – Stephanie Rosenbloom
No Scrolling Required At New Dating Sites
NY TIMES – Apr 13 – Me So Far is one in a spate of recently founded dating services that combine the power of the Internet with retro dating, with singles parties so big they are organized through Web sites, and real-life matchmakers who use Klout scores to help match couples. Me So Far costs from $20 to $30 a person. Amanda Hofman, CEO of Urban Girl Squad, a women’s networking group, said her parties are a result of the members’ desire to date through old-fashioned friendly introductions. So every few months, about 200 men and women in their 20s and 30s wear name tags and pay $15 each to sip drinks and mingle. Another dating concept being tested is Tawkify, a dating site without online profiles. Instead, Tawkify applicants submit photos and answer 10 questions about themselves. If they are accepted, a team of matchmakers interview them over the phone then set them up on a telephone date the following Monday at 10 p.m. Matches are told almost nothing about each other before the call, which is automated through a service that the Tawkify founders refer to as “Mr. Brooks,” because it seemed like a fine name for a dating butler. The company is billing itself as the first to use Klout scores, a measure of one’s digital influence, as a matchmaking metric. The higher your score, the more likely you are to be matched with someone of similar status. Hitch.me is a new dating site for LinkedIn members. Unlike most online dating sites, where users spend hours scrolling through profiles of strangers, on Hitch.me they can swiftly find someone — even someone who is in their business or social circle — then get off the site and meet.
Love, Lies And What They Learned
NY TIMES – Nov 13 – There are millions of Americans seeking love on the Internet. Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it. These scholars have gathered data from sites like Match.com, OkCupid and Yahoo! Personals to study attraction, trust, deception. ~81% of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles, according to a study led by an assistant professor Catalina L. Toma. In a different study she found that women’s profile photographs were on average a year and a half old. Men’s were on average six months old. Liars use more negative words like “not” and “never,” yet another way of putting up a buffer. Liars use fewer negative emotion words like “sad” and “upset,” and they write shorter online personal essays.
Second Love at First Click
NY TIMES – Oct 6 - Now, people 55 and older are visiting dating sites more than any other age group — up 39% in the last three years, according to Experian Hitwise. Greg Liberman, CEO of Spark Networks said that for the first eight months of this year, Spark had a 93% YOY increase in new members 50+ across all of its dating sites. Niche sites like SilverSingles and OurTime (which also includes dating profiles from SeniorPeopleMeet.com and SeniorsMeet.com) are capitalizing on the demand.
Background Checks
NY TIMES – Dec 18 - New York and New Jersey have begun regulating Internet dating sites. A law that takes effect this month in New York State, the Internet Dating Safety Act, requires sites to post common-sense safety tips, like “meet in a public place." In New Jersey, dating sites with a membership fee have to inform users whether they do criminal background checks. Whether it is possible to effectively screen people and make sites more truthful is unclear. "Background checks might lead daters to think everyone they encounter on the sites is safe", said Mandy Ginsberg, GM of Match.com. “What we want to do is provide some degree of safety,” said Robert Buchholz, founder of MyMatchChecker.com, a site that enables people to request background checks on anyone they have met on a dating site. The basic background search costs $9.95. Mobile phone apps, such as ValiMate, aim to make background checks as quick and easy as ordering a pizza. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES
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The New Dating Tools: A Card And A Wink
NY TIMES – July 21 – Unlike traditional dating sites where members spend hours on computers writing profiles and scrutinizing photographs, a raft of newfangled dating tools are striving to better bridge the gap between online and real-world romance. Ms. Cheek, an architect, founded one such venture, Cheek’d, which had its debut in May. Users receive calling cards to dole out to alluring strangers they encounter in their everyday lives, be it in a club or in a subway on their morning commute. Recipients of the cards can use the identification code printed on them to log onto Cheekd.com and send a message to their admirer. Cheek’d is not the only new company integrating calling cards and the Internet. Inspired by their own love story, Rachel and John DeAlto, 30 and 33, founded FlipMe!, which was introduced a few weeks ago and works similarly to Cheek’d. Card users said companies like FlipMe! and Cheek’d are emboldening them to approach people who might otherwise have been missed connections. Other companies are helping singles connect through location-based technology on their mobile phones. In the last few years the number of Web sites and apps like Grindr, Are You Interested? and Urban Signals, has swelled. One of the biggest is the free iPhone dating application Skout, which recently surpassed its millionth member.
The full article was originally published at NY Times, but is no longer available.
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