Markets 
Hinge on Wednesday launched a new feature called Friend’s Take, allowing friends and family members to leave testimonials on their loved one’s dating profiles – bringing wingmen into the digital age.
If you’ve ever enlisted a friend for advice in building your profile, now they can participate directly in the app, responding to prompts with text, photos or videos with details about their favorite memory of you or your best traits.
“Dating has always been a team effort, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy way for the people who know you best to be part of creating your Hinge profile,” Ben Celebicic, Hinge’s chief product and tech officer, said in a statement.
“Friend’s Take makes room for those who are always alongside you as you date and gives potential matches a richer, more authentic sense of who someone is before they meet.”
In the “Edit Profile” section of their Hinge account, daters will be able to select an option to add a Friend’s Take, which gives them a unique link to send to their friends or family.
As many as 10 people can add testimonials and they are not required to have their own Hinge profile to do so.
Testimonials must be less than 150 characters and daters can review each take before posting as many as three responses to their profile.
It’s the industry’s latest attempt to appeal to Gen Zers, who use dating apps significantly less than their millennial counterparts – citing a desire to find a match the old-fashioned way.
Bumble has seen its paid users slipping, while Match Group – which owns Hinge and Tinder – has undergone a rebrand in an attempt to win back young singletons.
Tinder, Match’s largest brand, has allowed users to share their music tastes and zodiac signs on their profile.
Hinge, which has a reputation for connecting people looking for long-term relationships, recently added Date Ideas, which allows users to propose specific activities like a walk in the park at a certain time.
It also started rewarding users who demonstrate “thoughtful” behavior, like taking the time to read through a user’s full profile – flagging them as good-faith users with a purple heart next to their name.
“These are all components where, individually, they’re really cool, but collectively, they showcase a real signal of what our focus is,” CEO Jackie Jantos told Bloomberg.
Read the full article here
