News & Tips for Online Dating

Are you in the San Francisco Bay Area? If you are, you should come out Friday evening! I'll be on a dating panel after What They Said About Love, a one-man show:

"Funny, poignant, thoughtful, and revealing about the search for love.
It was an amazing performance.” 
–Richard Connema, TalkinBroadway.com

It's taking place at The Marsh in Berkeley (map) at 8pm. Tickets are $20 – $35 sliding scale, or $55 and $100 for Reserved Seating.

I'm especially excited because he uses different voices for each character. I love good voice actors! So I'm quite excited for the show.

If it feels like you’re putting in a lot of swiping to get one good date, it might be because of your profile picture. Tune-up is an app that analyzes your picture and gives feedback so that you’ll have a greater chance of being paired with someone that you’ll actually like.

Turning to the internet to find love? According to OkCupid, now is the time to get back on that app! Late December through Valentine’s Day is peak online dating season, and if you’re among the 60% of singles that uses an app, you might want to update your profile (#newyearnewyou).

Online dating coach Greg Schwartz says you get the best matches when you use the best photos. But how do you know which profile pictures will work well? AI Profile Upgrade, a new tool built on Clarifai’s visual recognition AI, can help you decide.

WHY WE LOVE IT
First impressions count, we all know this, but are you sure your profile picture is creating a spark, showing who you are, and why you’re interesting? Are you compelling your viewers to look further into your photos and profile? Online dating can be frustrating, so anything that can help make it a little easier is a plus!

HOW YOU DO IT
We caught up with Greg to understand what he’s built and how he’s using Clarifai to help frustrated singles to well, date better.

Clarifai: What inspired your idea for a profile tune-up tool?
I've coached professional men for years at Make Online Dating Fun, and both men and women make the same mistakes! From wearing sunglasses in their photos (which prevents connection) to sharing big group photos with friends (it’s hard to tell which one is you!), these qualities can make or break the first impression. And if your profile text is blank? Forget about it. It makes starting a conversation that much harder.

Tell us a bit more, what are some of the other mistakes that your app will tune-up?
Some of the other consistent mistakes:

• Photos with them and their ex: which the viewer won’t be happy to see and don’t laugh; it happens more often than you think!
• Photos of things: Your car, table, bike, or whatever may be impressive, but the viewer wants to see you instead.
• Obscene messages: they may be hot to you, but they aren't to the receiver.

Less than perfect profiles not only decrease the number of matches you’ll get, but the quality of interactions with your matches plummets too. These easy-to-fix mistakes make online dating harder than it should be.
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How did you build the app?
It’s built on Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku, with a lot of the image rating done via Clarifai. A lot is going on, so we have to send the report to your email address once it’s ready.

It’s free to use. Click here and then log in to your online dating platform (it works with Tinder and OkCupid, with Bumble coming soon). The app will analyze your profile, and after a little while, you’ll get an email with tips on how to tune it up. We’re starting with photos, and we’ll start doing profile text and messages in a few weeks. By improving the profiles of everyone, not just the men I’m working with, everyone’s online dating gets easier and more fun!

What was the best part about working with the Clarifai API?
Clarifai’s General model gave us a lot of awesome aspects we could tag, and the API made it really easy to send images and get tags back! Also loved how helpful the Clarifai team was on Twitter, and via email.

Thanks for sharing, Greg!
To learn more, check out our documentation and sign-up for a free Clarifai account to start using our API – all it takes is a few lines of code to get up and running! We’re super excited to share all the cool things built by our developer community, so don’t forget to tweet @Clarifai to show us your amazing apps.

If you’re curious to hear more about how Greg can give your online profile a tune-up, you can email him at [email protected].
Remember, if you’re single, use AI to upgrade your profile right now!

Was this you at midnight on New Year's?

No? I've definitely been there... It sucks! I remember the feelings of "ugh, why is everyone else getting a kiss, and not me?" and "Oh god, I still haven't found someone, and I'm ___ years old! What am I doing?!" and "Ok, this year will be different!"

So then you made a New Year's Resolution to finally find a girlfriend. I get it, it's one of the most common New Year's Resolutions. I've done it, too, before I found my girlfriend.

And I hate to bring it up, but I bet you probably made that resolution last year. (Or the year before that.)
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Would you like to find out how to actually have it happen this year? To find out:

• Why it didn't work last year
• What you'll probably do wrong in 2018
• What you don't even realize is standing in your way
• What you can do to get around all of that

Lucky for you, on Sunday at 8:30pm PT I'll be talking about exactly that! Come join me:

Or you could try doing the same thing you did in 2017.

... of course, it didn't work last year. So why would it work in 2018? You're liable to end up like this guy:

Don't do that! It's the beginning of the year -- now is the perfect time to try something new.

Join me on Sunday at 8:30pm PT: