Coffee Meets Bagel: Another Level of Online Dating
While technology is changing, online dating becomes so popular among singles who want difference experiences in relationship and who cannot find desired relationships in their neighborhood. So, many online dating websites appear enormously, and hundreds of millions of people are using the websites in good and bad ways. A lot of websites are trying to make money from users, and many users use fake information to mislead potential partners. There are just thousands of people you can connect at any time, resulting that no one can get a special attention from anyone while users are spending a lot of money every month or every year.
Coffee Meets Bagel is first founded in San Francisco, and it provides a different dating experience for people. It is safer, and it costs no money to be members. Coffee Meets Bagel is taking advantage of social networks to connect people in similar background and same neighborhood. A Facebook account is needed to be the member. CMB gives one match to all users at every noon. So, since every user can only have one match every day, each user has 24 hours to think about a potential partner, and the user can like or pass. If both users like each other, they will have a SMS connection to greet and meet. It is safe because the users can see a lot of background information about their matches before they like.
Coffee Meets Bagel is based on social networking. Basically, all the matches among users will have at least one mutual friend. Most matches will be friends of friends according to facebook. In this case, all the users will be nodes, and edges connecting to nodes are determined as strong ties or weak ties depending on how close two users are. So, if two users have one or more mutual friends, the edge is more likely to be a strong tie. However, whether the edge is strong tie or weak tie depends on many conditions: the same neighborhood, the similar education background, the ethnicity and religion preference and the age preference. If all conditions are met, the edge will be a strong tie, and if no condition is met, the edge will be a weak tie, then two users connected by the weak tie would not be matched. Moreover, CMB has an option of “Give”. So, the user can recommend any of his/her own Bagels to friends so they can receive him/her as a match. Friends can help each other to meet each desired match. Therefore, if a “give” is found, the connection between two recommended users will be a strong tie, and they will be matched.
Many users have good experiences with their matches because of advantages of the social network CMB is using. Since the edges of strong ties or weak ties are determined based on members’ preferences and mutual friends they have, many of the members find partners who have similar interests and hobbies. As a result, the couples get happy lives together.
Source: http://www.sfstation.com/2013/02/14/online-dating-meets-social-networking-at-coffee-meets-bagel/#