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Online dating is a fifteen years industry and it doesn’t seem to be stopping, but growing and expanding to new frontiers. In the past years, people have put the awkwardness of a public encounter aside and started chatting with random strangers online. Why? Because when you are behind a computer, you can be whoever you have always wished to be. The only problem is that if you decide to meet the person in real life, something might go wrong if your vision of you is “slightly” different from who you are.
Dating is an industry that is old as much as the human being and different markets have relied on it. I am talking about cinemas, caffes, pubs, bars, clubs and any other place where social interactions take place. That’s why technology had to also fill this market. It all started with websites that let people chat, read their info, exchange maybe numbers and meet in real life. However in the past years, the whole experience has evolved.
Online dating was forced to adapt to the new trends in technology that have been introduced. First of all, smartphones. A new market of dating apps has risen, giving the chance to Tinder and other apps, such as Carrot Dating, to have a shot at this market. Location has been a big feature that has helped a lot of mobile apps. I am also thinking about Highlight, which is an app that lets you discover the people who are around you.
However the Facebook platform is what really changed the game for developers and users, who don’t have to build or fill long forms of data and info anymore. People can just press a button and give every single kind of information, that Facebook owns, to the dating service. This makes things easier and interactions a lot more intensive. That’s why we have always thought that Facebook could have introduced a dating feature in the last 10 years, but never did.
The amount of data they have is capable of matching every single couple on earth and make people happy; but that’s not the point. What we are talking about is the way technology has changed and the way dating was forced to follow innovation. There are services who are aiming at matching people, others that think attraction is what matters and even others that use built in chats to create interactions between random strangers.
The problem has always been the same. There are too many different services doing too many things and the competition is so high. Although this is an almost twenty years old industry, there are still startups that are trying to tackle the problem from different sides, with the new technology we have. Finding the right people on the right service is difficult and when you start a social networking service, you always have to fill it up with dump data to create the first interactions.
Facebook could think of seriously taking in consideration the problem and solve it, given the amount of data available and the monthly active users; but it seems the chat, the friend requests and the poke already make the magic happen. In this industry, there will never be a final winner, but always trends that sometimes fail or keep iterating for several years. Although it’s an old industry and it’s so difficult to become the “ONE”, this is a gold mine.
The innovations that will be available in the next few years, such as Glass, smart watches, smart walls and smart cars will force us to live on the internet and there is no better place to connect people. In the next few years, we’ll see products pivoting toward these new technologies and others starting up on them.
We only wonder if the aim should be to date or to discover interesting people who surround you.
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