The 5:30 Date

Vegeterians, Christians, and wannabe adulterers, rejoice! 

Dating is no easy task, and nothing's worse than investing time and money into a potential relationship, only to discover an unflattering dealbreaker. She smokes, he's a vegeterian, whatever. 

Luckily, in the sea of dating apps available, certain website developers have tailored their sites to serve just about any demographic imaginable. Married, but still looking for some fun on the side? There's a site for that. Want to date a farmer, because the city dwellers just don't get your lifestyle? There's a site for that. Willing to date anyone, just as long as they swear allegiance to Mac products only? Oh yeah, there's a site for that.

Business Insider has compiled a list of fifteen niche-dating sites for everyone from the aforementioned to geeks, Democrats, and beyond. If some of the site ideas sound too farfetched, however, Insider goes a step further. To calm any skeptics, each category contains the real-life story of a couple who met on the site.

While we here at 530date have been chronicling the various online dating sites in the past few weeks, we also wanted to gather the general feeling of some readers about whether they would use dating sites. 

This past week, nearly 100 respondents (thanks!) answered two poll questions for us. The first gauged the general preference for online or "offline" dating. The second asked respondents to consider whether meeting someone after reading their online profiles and learning a bunch of information about the person would take all of the fun and wonder out of dating.

Results are below.

Note: The U.S. map only tracks registered "Show of Hands" (poll app) users' responses. Since many respondents aren't registered users, the map is in no way an accurate reflection of geographic distribution or each state's leaning. 

UPDATE: After researching the SOH archives, we found a similar question that has been asked (credit to user "inge"), this poll shows the full feature availability and response categorical breakdown.

530date spent a rainy spring evening listening getting the lowdown on the state of the online dating world from e-dating expert Laurie Davis.

And even though it was last night, you can attend too without having to leave the comfort of your own home because we live-tweeted it for you.

Check it out.

Tweets about "#530datelive"

In 2009, Laurie Davis searched #dating on Twitter. Intrigued by a tweet sent by @ThomasHEdwards, founder of the Professional Wingman, she direct messaged him and asked to meet for a drink.

  Davis’ Twitter handle, @eFlirtexpert is representative of her professional life. Shortly after her #dating search, Davis founded an electronic dating advice service here in New York.

  Fast forward 5 years to Davis’ most recent tweet, sent Monday morning, “Back at home with @ThomasHEdwards after my #bachelorette weekend. Few things are as amazing as waking up next to him.”

  After a meeting sparked by the Twitter DM she sent, today, Davis and Edwards are just three weeks away from their wedding day.

  Davis, who spends her days counseling people on how to represent themselves –and flirt—electronically says finding companionship through an online medium is no longer limited to sites like OKCupid or Match.com.

  “Any tool that we use online can be considered online dating -- social networks are the unexplored gem. There isn’t a clear cut way to do this, but the purpose is to meet and it’s pretty fabulous,” she said.

  In response to an interview question about how the increase of dating sites and apps have changed New York City’s dating culture, Davis said she feels, “Meeting offline is never going to go away, but moving forward – neither is meeting online. In order to fully put yourself out there, you need to be doing both.”

  Kal Kotoski, 28, recently moved to New York from Minneapolis. “I feel dating sites and apps are crucial --especially in a city like this,” he said about New York.

  “In a small community, you can meet people out on the town and potentially have a date or hook up. Of course, you can have hook ups here, but I don’t feel people really have the time –or take the time—to go out on a particular night to look for someone nice.”

  Kotoski is currently a few months in to a relationship with a Columbia University Medical Center Intensive Care Unit nurse that started due to a mutual “right swipe” on Tinder. She is the former head of the web design team at NBC news.

  Tinder, which is commonly stigmatized by the college demographic as a “joke” or an easy way to find a “one-night-stand,” doesn’t feel that way to Kotoski.

   “There are some really interesting, genuine people on there,” he said. “If you take it seriously, and don’t use it like a creep.”

  However, my personal experience with the app, showed exactly what I predicted: users within the college demographic, the age group just shy of Kotoski’s, are mostly messing around. During my three-day trial period, I received messages like “Wanna Fuck,” and “Interested in being my Tinderella?”

  Davis said she finds the way people ages 18-23 use dating sites and apps interesting, and believes some of the stigma that surrounds them stems from this age group.

  “The reason things lines like ‘wanna fuck’ fly on apps like Tinder is because there is a computer—or phone—in between the interaction. We feel like we can let our guard down in different ways. Ways which might not necessarily be positive,” she said.

  While the computer and the phone present somewhat of a firewall for these ridiculous pick-up lines to be tossed around, Davis says that’s not an entirely bad thing.

  “With electronic dating, there is this increasing trend of being vocal about your feelings, intentions and dating preferences, which is actually a good thing,” she said.

  “You’ll know – immediately – if someone wants to meet up with you because they want a fling, or because they want a relationship. These apps take away the vagueness, and allow you to know if you’re really on the same page.”

  In terms of the stigma, Davis says she isn’t aware that it exists outside of the college set. In her opinion, online and app based dating is widely accepted post-graduation.

  “When you’re on campus, you have access to so many people, and your social life is concentrated in one little area,” she said. “You’re unfortunately subject to social judgment and critique by your peers.”

  “When you leave campus, dating becomes a bit more challenging because you’re in the work force, you friends have moved, you’re building a new life, you don’t have campus security anymore,” she said. “But that also means you have to consider other ways to branch out and meet people, which is cool.”

  Looking forward, Jozen Cummings, the dating columnist for The New York Post, says he can’t imagine dating will be “overtaken by the drones.”

530date was spending the night tweeting in their pajamas, when they happened to stumble into a twitter exchange with Brandon Luong, the CEO of Datelytics, one of the latest dating apps to hit the market.

He salsa dances, he runs a dating app, and, did we mention, he’s single?

530date got the inside story.

[Note: Transcript lightly edited with Brandon’s permission.]

530date: Tell us what your app does and why we need it.

​Luong: Datelytics gathers events and daily deals from popular websites based on your Facebook profile, and matches you with someone… Once a user signs onto the app, we analyze their liked pages, check-ins, hashtags and activities to find events and daily deals, such as those on Eventbrite, Meetup, Groupon and Livingsocial, the user would enjoy. ​Once the user selects an event, we ping other attendees that have similar interests… 

We want you to enjoy the things you like, and share it with someone. Why force yourself to setup a coffee date when you really would prefer meeting up at the restaurant down the street you been wanting to try?

530date: What made you decide to start Datelytics?

Luong: It all started when I was researching user experience on mobile applications when I stumbled upon dating apps. Being adventurous, I decided to give it a try... The things I ran into were:

- Pain in the ass subscription fees to chat with other members. C'mon, you're seriously going to charge for the most basic human need?

- I spent more time answering butt load of questions than actually meeting people. I could've gone salsa dancing and met someone there by the time I finished 69 similar questions on eHarmony.

- Gave permission to access my Facebook when it didn't do anything other than take my photo, name, location and age. Kinda pointless to grant you access to my huge amount of data to only pull that up. 

- Lastly, the most annoying thing were the amount of bots and spam. That was exactly what I wanted from a dating app: chatting with bots who will ask for naughty time within the first two minutes. 

I discovered I wasn't the only person having bad experience on these apps. After attending a few conventions on social media, big data and analytics, I decided on my birthday to start this venture to see if I can change the online dating scene. Thus, my story on how I became a single father.

530date: What’s your favorite part of your job?

Luong: Favorite part of the job? Too many to list, but I guess my favorite part so far would be when I get to tell people about the product, and see their reactions on the idea, value proposition, design and other things. ​I loved interacting with my potential consumers, gaining feedback and understanding how I should approach the market down the road.

530date: What’s the weirdest part of your job?

​Luong: Oddly enough, I haven't ran into that just yet. Probably just jinxed myself. However, I occasionally have people ask if I will be using the app to get dates for myself. My thing is that I'm trying to get for my users, so I may be too busy to date myself. Then again I'm also building this app because I saw the problem I experienced, so I guess we will see.  

530date: How do you think technology impacts dating?

Luong: …It is the thing enabling us to meet new people we wouldn't have met otherwise…People realize they enjoy time efficiency.... If you look at Tinder, that is their value proposition. They don't really offer much other than saving time on hunting for booty.

530date: How does running a dating app affect your dating life?

​Luong: Running a startup has basically taken over my life, but not in a bad way. It is something I am passionate about, and want to see it through. In terms of my dating life, I don't think it has affected it what so ever. Haven't found the one yet, and not sure what will happen once I do find her. I would probably continue working on Datelytics and level up to one of those couple apps.

530date: And lastly, give us some dating tips!​​

HowAboutWe mapped out New York City neighborhoods by their residents' number of partners; see where your nabe stands

530date loves good data journalism but we're plagued by curiosity. Why? East Harlemites are sexier? Clearly they're sexing it up: 19.6 percent report having three or more sexual partners in the last year compared to Pelham's 1.9 percent.

We did some digging using data from City-Data.

East Harlem

Median Age: 31.4 years

Married Population: 19.9%

Population Density: 77,397 people/square mile

Pelham

Mediate Age:  39 years

Married Population: 56.5% 

Population Density: 8,474 people/square mile

Conclusion: more people= more sexy times.

And you can come too, even though it's over.

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Because what's sexier than dating yourself? Share your boyfriendtwin photos with us:...

Two theories:

1) Cynical: Dating is pain, so why not just date yourself?

2) Romantic: One of the joys of relationships is when you spend lots of time with someone you become like them. Maybe a little bit of both?

So, last weekend 5:30date went online and decided to do some deep rumination about the ailments of modern society: too little time, too many options, an aversion to long and potentially awkward conversations….and thought, what represents all of this, packed up with a pretty red bow?

Speed dating!

And the next thought was: let’s go!

Okay guys, we’ll be honest. Our prof said, livetweet something, yo, and we were like, speed dating? Let’s do it.

And we did it. We brushed ourselves up, meandered down to the East Side, and sidled into The Watering Hole, introduced ourselves, parked ourselves at the bar, and live tweeted.

And—get this—our very own Kimberley Ammiano was asked to step up because the event was short on ladies.

David is a twenty-two year old theatre buff and student at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He uses apps like SCRUFF, a gay app for chatting, dating, and social networking with guys worldwide, as well as Grindr, an app that helps users find local gay, bi, and curious guys for dating or friendship, and Tinder, a location-based app that matches mutually interested users.  

Q: Why all three, what do you use them for?

A: I use scruff regularly (unless I'm in an exclusive thing). I sometimes use grindr just to see if there's anybody only available on there. I also use Tinder to try and meet women, but the only girls who match with me are bots and prostitutes, so that was a failed mission. 

Q: What are the major similarities and differences between them?

A: The biggest similarity I find between grindr and scruff is that the focus is so much on sex. I also find that apps create a hierarchy of levels of male attractiveness and a kind of 'Mean Girls,' style table breakdown -- you have the hot muscly men, the lascivious hairy daddys, the twinks..and then the rest of us. 

Q: How do you think apps have changed the concept of organic dating -- is organic dating old news now?

A: I don’t think organic dating is old news at all, but I think it shows that the games and pretenses of organic dating are not that effective. I still get people’s numbers in bars, but I think people know that if you’re going to pussy foot around the issue there’s a second world where people won’t dick you around. And apps can produce some great relationships, I’ve dated people I thought I would just hook up with. I don’t think anybody should rely on apps or online dating because they can produce noxious atmospheres and weird senses of self-worth or self-hatred, but mixed in with a healthy real world dating scene I think it helps cut shit and remove the focus on trying to receive results quickly with somebody you just met in a bar if you can get exactly what you want in a medium prepared for such a discussion.

And now… for two short anecdotes… 

David’s “Twisted” experience with Grindr:'

'Men are always looking for people to complete their weird fetishes on apps. I once started talking to a man at university who looked like Michael Fassbender so I was all for the chat. But he kept asking how good I was at punching (spoilers: can’t do it) and I kept saying I was a very strong man. But it was when I asked how I’d contact him to let him know I was at his and he said ‘knock on the door, ask if I’m Dave, and when I say I am punch me in the face and take off your clothes’ to which I asked ‘and then what?’ and then he said the words that made me delete grindr almost entirely for the rest of my life:

‘rape me’.

I mean, what if it was his friend called Dave he sent to the door and this was a really twisted catfish? And even if that wasn’t the case, that just. Isn’t. On. But people want things like that. Somebody asked my friend if they could paint him up like an avocado and have sex with him. That shit’s whack-amole.'

And his ‘lovely’ experience:

“Do girls really think they’re going to meet their next boyfriend on Tinder,” a tall, dark, and handsome twenty-two year old male said to me during a conversation with friends. “That app is such a joke, I literally sit on the pooper and swipe left-right-left-right. I don’t know how anyone could possibly take it seriously,” he continued.

  Tinder, which launched on September 15, 2012 allows users to upload eight photos of themselves and to write a bio of 500 characters. Then, based on zip code, users are given a never-ending batch of local people who they can like or reject based on photos. If there is a ‘match,’ meaning two users ‘like’ each other, an internal chat is set up.  

  Ann Friedman, a writer for The Cut, a web magazine for women, argues a point not far off from the above mentioned young man’s. “[Tinder] is fast and casual – a far cry from many dating sites’ detailed filters for religion or hobbies. Tinder just pulls photos and basic data from Facebook, and in almost no time at all, users get exactly what we all do in social settings anyway: judge people based on appearance alone.”

  Hannah, a twenty-two-year-old who recently moved to New York from Chicago says the app’s swipe left to reject, right to like concept freaked her out. “It just seems really aggressive,” she says. “I know that when we walk into a room, we often naturally judge people based on the way they look, but photos just aren’t enough.”

   “When you’re in a bar, you can at least see if a guy is belligerent, out of control, or just chilling there with his friends and seems normal,” Hannah laughs. “You can Facebook stalk someone until you’re blue in the face, but you still don’t know anything about that person. When you’re there in person – even at a distance, you get a sense of who they really are.”

  Hannah says she will have a casual, “Hey how are you,” conversation with someone when she’s bored, but would never actually meet anyone in person. She says this is not true for many of her friends. Her roommate and best friend are currently ‘fairly serious’ with guys they met on the app.

... and landed this trophy wife.

Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast. But what is love today in a world where people use dating aps to find each other? How do you find love between the spaces of messages exchanged on okCupid? And what is love like for each and every single one of us, regardless of our race, sexual orientation, number of partners, religion, and preferences?

We are a team of Columbia Journalism students who are devoted to exploring the different permutations of modern relationships.

Every week we’ll bring you profiles and site reviews from a certain theme. In the interim we’ll sprinkle in news updates for anything that sheds light on loving and living in today's world.

You can follow us on twitter @530date.

Keep loving. Keep living. Keep dating.

Cheers.