Stupid Patent Of The Month: Facebook Joins The Online Dating Arms Race

from the social-dating-is-patent-protected dept

Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it will wedge its way into an already-crowded corner of online commerce. The social networking site plans to use its giant storehouse of personal data to create a dating service, promising to help users find "meaningful relationships," not just "hookups," as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook's new service will be a "Tinder-killer" that users flock to, or a flop for a company that's long been beset with privacy concerns. But there's one thing Facebook, its competitors, and its detractors should all be able to agree on. When a new dating service launches, it should rise or fall based on whether it can win the trust of users—not an arbitrary race to the Patent Office.

Unfortunately, well before it built and launched an actual dating service, Facebook engaged in just such a race. The company applied for a stupid patent on "social dating" back in 2013, and earlier this year, the Patent Office granted the application.

Take Established Methods, Add One "Social Graph"

Online dating is a perfect example of a software-based business that truly doesn't need patents to be innovative. Companies have built such services based on what they hope will be useful or attractive to different groups of users, rather than engaging in arguments over who did what first. Patent tiffs are particularly pointless in a space like online dating, which builds on a long history of pre-digital innovation. Placing personal ads in newspapers has a history that dates back more than a century.

The first claim of Facebook's US Patent No. 9,609,072 describes maintaining a "social graph" of user connections, then allowing one to request "introductions" to friends-of-friends. Subsequent claims are variations on the theme, like allowing users to include "preferences" and rank their possible matches.

This application should have been rejected under the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 decision in CLS Bank v. Alice. In that case, the high court made it clear that simply adding "do it on a computer"-style jargon to long-established ways of doing business wasn't enough to get a patent. Unfortunately, here, the Patent Office allowed Facebook to pull a similar trick. The company essentially took the idea of introducing available singles through friends-of-friends, added graphics, profiles and the "social graph," and then got a patent on it.

The idea of finding good matches is positively ancient, whether people have been looking for the right lover, the right product, or the right business partner. It doesn't warrant a patent, and when patent trolls have claimed otherwise, they haven't fared well in court.

"Having two or more parties input preference data is not inventive," wrote U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in 2013, as she dismantled the patent of a shell company called Lumen View Technology LLC. "Matchmakers have been doing this for millennia."

Patently Pointless

To be fair to Facebook, the company may have felt compelled to get its own stupid patent because there are so many other stupid online dating patents out there. In a phenomenon that's the patent equivalent of "mutually assured destruction," many tech companies have stockpiled poor-quality Internet patents simply to have a threat to fight off other companies' poor-quality Internet patents. This arms race, of course, costs many millions of dollars and benefits no one other than patent system insiders.

In the world of online dating, wasteful, anti-competitive patent litigation isn't just theoretical. Earlier this year, Match Group sued up-and-comer Bumble for patent infringement. The suit was brought shortly after Match reportedly tried to purchase Bumble. And in 2015, Jdate sued Jswipe, accusing their competitor of infringing U.S. Patent No. 5,950,200, which tried to claim the idea of notifying people that they "feel reciprocal interest for each other." It was a basic patent that sought to encompass just about the whole concept of a dating service.

This growing web of stupid patent claims won't stop Facebook from getting into online dating. It won't stop Facebook's giant competitors, like Match Group or IAC. But for an entrepreneur who wants to start a new business, the costly dueling patent claims will be a barrier. The battle to win the hearts and minds of online daters should be won with apps and code, not with patents.

Republished from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

Filed Under: dating, online dating, patents, stupid patent of the month
Companies: facebook

Sevens Marry Sevens: Is Online Dating Making Mixed-Attractiveness Couples More Rare?

from the hot-math dept

We don't talk a great deal about online dating here at Techdirt, which is actually kind of strange, because it's a digital evolution of a sort. But the very good Priceonomics site recently had a fascinating post about some of the visible impacts the prevalence of online dating is producing, namely that anecdotal evidence suggests that it is making so-called "mixed-attractiveness couples" more rare.

The post starts off by dispelling the myth that opposites attract. Instead, studies seem to suggest that relationships tend to form mostly within our own social circles, class circles, and within our general realm of physical attractiveness. The vulgar way of putting this has always been: a seven will date a seven, a six might date an eight, but a two will never marry a ten. The exceptions to this rule appear to be based around how long two people have known each other before entering a romantic relationship.

There is an exception, however, to this seeming rule that people always date equally attractive people: The longer two people know each other before they start dating, the more likely it is that a 3 will date a 6, or a 7 will marry a 10. Which is interesting to think about as dating apps, which match strangers up for dates, take over the dating world. Because if more and more people meet their future spouse on a first date, the mixed-attractiveness couple might just go extinct.

That conclusion is a bit simplistic, of course, as there are many other things that enter into the attractiveness equation. But it would be silly to suggest that physical attraction isn't a primary motivator most of the time as far as first impressions go. That's the whole point of the exception to the rule: a person may later learn to be attracted to someone that they were not physically attracted to from the jump. But if these first impressions are based primarily on dating sites and apps where physical appearance is so much easier to discern compared with personality traits? Then certainly a greater weight on physicality will produce less divergence of that trait amongst couples that choose to enter into relationships.

This dynamic interested Lucy Hunt, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, who decided to investigate “how time might affect how similarly attractive couple members are to one another.” Working with two psychologists, Hunt looked at 167 couples who participated in a long-term study at Northwestern. They asked each couple how long they’d known each other before they started dating, and they recruited people to watch videotapes of the couples and rate each individual’s physical attractiveness.

The researchers speculated that people who had known their partner before they started dating would break the rule of assortative mating. And that’s just what they found. Among couples who met when they started dating, both people were about equally attractive. But among friends-first couples, 3s dated 7s and 5s married 8s.

They also did an experiment within a classroom, asking students at the start of a term to rate their classmates' desirability generally and again three months later. At the start of the term, the class generally agreed on who was attractive and who wasn't, but three months later the ratings amongst the class showed a much greater delta. They got to know their classmates better and that affected the ratings. Common sense, right? Except when dating apps come into play, the sorting happens before anyone gets to know anyone. Many dating sites actually incorporate matching people's attractiveness into the matches they offer to users.

The swipe-left, swipe-right dating app Tinder, for example, is known for making matches based on an internal attractiveness ranking it calculates for each of its users. As Sean Rad, the founder of Tinder, has explained to Fast Company, Tinder calls each user’s ranking his or her “elo score.” The term comes from the world of professional chess, where elo scores are used to rank players. If an average player beats a grandmaster, her score increases significantly. If a great player loses to an even better player, his elo score only drops a few points.

Tinder’s approach is not unique. The founders of the Dating Ring, a service profiled by the podcast “Startup”, have talked about ranking users’ attractiveness from one to ten to match them up. “Studies show that people tend to date people of similar levels of attractiveness, and our whole goal is to try to increase the probability that two people will meet up,” Dating Ring CEO Lauren Kay told the hosts of Startup. “We match people within one attractiveness point.”

And with the trend in dating being a shorter time between meeting someone and dating them, with dating sites and apps playing a key role in this shift, matching people based on physical desirability because that's how it tends to work outside of dating sites becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The algorithms will reinforce this by trimming people's pool of candidates to their own desirability class, and we might see the end of mixed-attractiveness couples generally speaking.

Is that a bad thing? I don't know. I'm married and never did any online dating at all, so I have zero experience with it. I do know that if I were a user of any of these sites, I would feel potentially cheated out of meeting great candidates because the algorithm thought I was too attractive or ugly to meet them. But that ultimately doesn't matter, as the trends show that online dating isn't going anywhere, so we might just all have to get used to seeing synced up couples from a physical standpoint.

Filed Under: attractiveness, dating, online dating

DailyDirt: The Mating Behavior of Online Daters

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Online dating sites provide a vast amount of interesting data for researchers studying human behavior. These sites record how much people lie about themselves to try to impress others, and dating sites contain a wide variety of personal data that can be sliced and diced according to age, gender, income, education, interests, you-name-it. Here are just a few studies that have looked at digital dating databases for insights into the minds of people searching for soul mates and long walks on the beach.

• A study of 18 different dating sites, including eHarmony, Match, Plenty of Fish and Yahoo Personal, suggests that online daters are maybe slightly more successful at finding spouses than offline daters. The study also pointed out that there wasn't much difference between dating sites based on breakup rates, although some online dating sites had higher ratings for marriage satisfaction. (A+++ Would marry again!) [url]
• A meta-analysis for over 400 academic studies about online dating stated that about 25 million people use dating websites. The results of online dating aren't exactly conclusive, but with more and more people meeting mates with the help of websites, "online dating" is getting to be just like "dating". [url]
• About 81% of online daters misrepresent the facts about how tall, how heavy, or how old they are. Interestingly, people with online dating profiles are also more likely to admit to being fat than being conservative. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: marriage, matching, online dating, personal data, relationships, romance
Companies: eharmony, match.com

DailyDirt: Looking For Love In Some Of The Wrong Places

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Online dating is by no means a new thing anymore, and by some counts, we're on the third iteration of improvement for internet dating. So that means we should be pretty close to perfecting these services, right? (Third time's the charm?) Matching algorithms will probably get better and better with time, but then so will expectations. Here are just a few interesting links for geeky singles out there.

• Psychologists have pointed out that matching algorithms for long-term relationships are not significantly better than random. Dating algorithms aren't actually so bad at excluding potentially "bad dates" -- but that's not what most online dating services offer. [url]
• The Secret Diamond Club takes advantage of some economic tricks to try to match up rich men with attractive women. The real secret, though, is that it probably doesn't work at all -- and it preys on lonely people with money. [url]
• Recently, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded for work on matching markets. The Gale-Shapely algorithm has been used for matching organ donors and doctors with hospitals, but maybe someday it'll be used for finding romantic partners, too. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: algorithms, economics, gale-shapely, matching markets, nobel prize, online dating, romance

Iranian Matchmaking Site Shut Down For Promoting Prostitution

from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept

Apparently an Iranian matchmaking site, that pretty clearly seemed set up for the purpose of linking up potential husbands and wives, rather than traditional "dating," has been banned in the country for promoting prostitution. The details aren't clear, but it certainly sounds like they viewed any kind of internet matchmaking, even for the purposes of marriage, as somehow "promoting prostitution."

Filed Under: iran, online dating, prostitution

Nobody Thinks Online Dating Is A Substitute For The Real Thing

from the finding-a-first-date dept

Unlike Brad Stone at the Times tech blog, I think webcam-based speed dating is a promising idea, and if I were single I'd probably try it out. Stone points out two objections to the concept, neither of which seems especially compelling. One is that "for a certain demented kind of person, live Web cameras are an invitation for nudity and public displays of self-affection." That doesn't strike me as a very serious obstacle, though. For one thing, as any woman who's tried old fashioned online dating (is online dating old enough to be called "old-fashioned" yet?) will tell you, men already send women inappropriate pictures of themselves using traditional personals sites. Secondly, this kind of abuse should be pretty easy to deter by asking for contact information, perhaps verified with a credit card. Few men are likely to expose themselves on a site that's keeping a video recording of the conversation and has their contact information on file. The other objection is that "brief, Web-brokered Internet chat sessions might not be the best gauge of whether an enduring connection is possible." But that objection applies to any online dating service—yet lots of people find Internet dating useful. The point of online dating services (and real-life "speed dating" services, which have also become popular) isn't to decide who to marry, and it's never been a substitute for more traditional dates. The point is to help you efficiently find people who seem worth the time and expense of a first date. If a service like this helps you avoid a date where the girl stares at her plate and mumbles to herself the whole meal, that seems like time and money well spent.

Filed Under: online dating, speed dating