How it looks. (Photo: OKCupid)

Good news, singletons: you can now spend your Bitcoins to help you get laid. OKCupid has begun accepting the popular decentralized digital currency as a form of payment. Payments will be accepted via Bitcoin wallet website Coinbase, according to an announcement on its blog.

Betabeat first reported two weeks ago that the IAC-backed site was considering accepting Bitcoins after a Reddit user posted a screenshot from an alleged OKCupid representative claiming that the company was looking to expand its payment options. 

Now, the news is official. When we logged in to our OKCupid account, we noticed there's an option for Bitcoin payments on the site’s “A-List” premium subscription service page. The link directs users to Coinbase to complete the payment.

OKCupid charges users $10 per month to access the enhanced features, like message read receipts and the ability to creep on profiles without the person knowing. Today Bitcoin is trading at $61, which means a six month subscription comes out to about .5 BTC.

We reached out for comment from OKCupid but have not yet heard back.

The Next Web notes that OKCupid’s acceptance of Bitcoins lends further legitimacy to the budding currency:

OKCupid’s user base isn’t exactly the kind that you’d think is familiar with or already dabbling in Bitcoins, and there’s a real irony in allowing an anonymous currency to be used on a dating site — where trust is a big factor — but the fact that OKCupid is making this move demonstrates the mainstream attention that digital currencies are receiving right now.

Smize harder, Bitcoins: it's your time to shine!

This is the tossed salad she was actually talking about. (Photo: tossedsalad.co.uk)

If you don't want to be greeted by an onslaught of messages from creepy guys asking about your butt, you might want to heed the advice of xoJane scribe Rachel Heller and not choose the online dating username "Tossed Salad."

Ms. Heller, as it turns out, didn't know that "tossed salad" could be used as a filthy euphemism (she was also a proud member of the PEN15 club in middle school), so she used it as her username on JDate. "It was conservative, it was cute, and it advertised my penchant for health-conscious eating (never a bad thing!)" she reasoned.

But Ms. Heller soon realized her mistake when the weird butt-themed messages began flowing into her inbox.

"I had told them all my butt was open for business," she laments.

This is a reminder to read up on your Urban Dictionary slang before registering your next online dating profile.

Soon? (Photo: BigTimeDates.com)

Bitcoin, the popular decentralized digital currency, is having a moment. Its worth topped $106 this morning, Bloomberg Businessweek called it the “global economy’s last safe haven,” and a smattering of online retailers are beginning to the accept the unregulated crypotcurrency.

Aside from Reddit, no other major websites have dipped their toes into the untested waters—just yet. So, several Redditors were surprised to see the IAC-backed dating site hint that it might soon implement Bitcoin as a payment option. The news arrived via an unverified, Imgur-hosted screenshot of an email from an OKCupid employee (named “Alice”) about changes to its billing methods.

(Photo: Imgur.com)

(Although the bulk of OKCupid’s services are free, there’s a $10 a month subscription service called “A-List.” That includes life-changing features like the ability to edit usernames and more customized search results to weed out the inevitable creeps.)

“We are hoping to add PayPal (and bitcoin) payment options in the next couple of months,” the employee responded in an email about payment options. “If they follow through, this is huge news. Okcupid is a giant,” responded one Redditor.

In response to questions from Betabeat about the post, an OKCupid spokeswoman declined to comment.  So for now, you’ll have to use your credit card if want to pay for the “best free dating site.” But start brushing up on your Bitcoin knowledge, it might be the new key to getting laid.

(Photo: Science of Relationships)

A/S/L? 20/F/California here.

Haha just kidding. Like the information contained in one third of New York dating profiles, that was a complete lie. According to a new study, a lot of us are chronic embellishers here on the web.

The study, conducted by dating auction site What's Your Price, found that New York is the third least honest city when it comes to online dating profiles, with 34 percent of New Yorkers fudging facts about traits like their appearance, career, age and education. Men frequently lie about their height and build, but some also apparently try to mask their more illegal hobbies.

"Another guy told me he didn't smoke, but he had weed growing in his back yard in Long Island," one woman told amNewYork.

Unlike people who try to be someone completely different on shows like Catfish, online daters frequently tweak their profiles so that they're full of half-truths, using real pictures of themselves but then lying about specific details like their salary.

The study also found the cities with the most truthful profiles: Houston, Phoenix, Boston, Charlotte and Minneapolis top the list, so they might be good places to start looking for a relationship. But then you'd have to leave New York, and who would ever want to do that?

Miss u (Photo: 1039 RXP)

Remember that Crazy Blind Date app from OKCupid that purports to set you up with someone who hopefully won't kill and/or maim you for a night on the town? Turns out it accidentally exposed users' email addresses and birthdays. Sucks for everyone who lied about their age! [Wall Street Journal]

Google is holding a developer event for Glass. If you paid that $1,500 to get a test pair of Glass, you're in for a treat. [AllThingsD]

California Rep. Zoe Lofgren has proposed a bill that she hopes will be called "Aaron's Law" aimed at modifying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which many say was abused in the Aaron Swartz case. [The Hill]

New MySpace seems kind of like it's just a big ad for Justin Timberlake's new song. [TechCrunch]

The awesome NASA mohawk guy is going to ride with a Mars Rover float in the Inaugural Parade, because America. [Wired]

(Photo: Derek Rose)

Internet dating not delivering the same thrill it used to? OKCupid would like you to try out a new service called "Crazy Blind Date," which lets users arrange to meet people they don't know much about it. It may sound like a Kate Hudson vehicle, but we assure you it's not. Not yet, anyway.  [AllThingsD]

A group of online anarchists, wait, sorry, archivists, released a Javascript-based bookmarklet that lets users "liberate" a public domain article from JSTOR in memorial to the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz. [ArsTechnica]

The word on Wall Street is that Michael Dell is looking at a deal to take his company private, a move which may free the PC-maker from the attentions of profit-hungry investors and give the company room to shift its strategy to better compete in mobile and cloud computing.  [Bloomberg]

The Feds says that Kim Dotcom's entrapment claims are baseless. Mr. Dotcom says he's going to unveil a new file-sharing service on January 19, the one-year anniversary of his arrest. [Wired]

Is Y Combinator funding the future of Windows spam? [IStartedSomething]

In case you forgot, Facebook is holding a press conference today, fueling speculation that Zuck & Co. will announce a new product. One guess: Search. [Pocket-lint]

via www.onlinedating.org

The basic premise of OkCupid, Match.com, or eHarmony seems to be that science, or at least math, is a better judge of a potential partner than you are. While you (fallible human) may fall for a winsome smile, the algorithm knows whether that guy or gal is too religious or kinky or short for you to really get along.

However a new report commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science calls bullshit, basically. Along with four other psychology professors, Northwestern's Eli Finkel found that while dating sites are a "terrific addition," the algorithms they employ are no better than having a "real estate agent of love," says Reuters. Does that mean they try to get you to go out with someone who is soulmate-adjacent?

Although Prof. Finkel didn't have access to the dating sites' proprietary algorithms, he told Reuters: "The assumption is they work. We reviewed the literature and feel safe to conclude they do not."

While the algorithm may reduce the number of potential partners from thousands to a few, they have never met and may be as incompatible as two people meeting at random, Finkel said, adding the odds are no better than finding a relationship by strolling into any bar.

We think what Prof. Finkfel meant to say there was, "Drink up, Forever Alones!"

Making threads. For your startup. (flickr.com)

WEAVE. Startup Threads, a merchandising site for startups from local newletter mogul and startup founder Frank Denbow, just launched a new monthly program where consumers can subscribe to receive new startup gear each month. The company will partner with a different startup each month to create interesting merchandise. Right now that lucky startup is Hipmunk, the company behind the new flight finding tool. Startup Threads hopes to become a "marketing channel for startups."

ALL ABOARD. StartupBus is now accepting applications for the hackathon-on-a-bus competition in March and this year New York will be represented. To get invited you've got to shine like the brightest star in the sky... or look on social media to see if people are offering invites. StartupBus said they are expecting way more applications than they can handle. You've been warned.

POINT AND SHOOT. Pixable just passed the million download mark. The program is a new way to view photos on the internet "based on an evolving algorithm that prioritizes the photos that matter most to you."

DOCTOR DOCTOR.  ZocDoc, a free service that makes it easy for patients to find nearby doctors who accept their insurance and instantly book appointments, online just went live in San Diego. The service is also up and running in New York, D.C., Chicago, Miami and other major cities.

LEARN. Get your free application in before Feb. 4 for the Founder Institute's Spring 2012 program. Gabe Zichermann, resident game mechanics expert for Ultralight Startups, runs the show.

THE FUTURE.  TEDxBigApple is hosting an event themed around "Disruptive Ideas." They'll cover the near-term (three to five years) "impact in housing, biotech, local spaces, biomimicry, fashion, business." The focus will be on "ideas that are likely to change the world." in the near-term (~3-5 years) instead of those whose  Tickets are $100.

EAT. Gary Whitehill of Entrepreneur Week is hosting Rockin Out For Breakfast 4, a networking event at Wichcraft for $25. Breakfast included.

HEY LADIES! Astia, which focuses on women-led, high-growth ventures is looking for applicants by Feb. 4. Applicants will be "screened"  at the "convenience of the CEO." The bootcamp is in Cambridge, UK in March but U.S. bootcamps may take place in New York or San Francisco "as needed."

HIRING. Sense Networks is looking for a software engineer to work with cutting edge, "big data" and "NoSQL" technologies. OkCupid is in need of a product designer. "You'll be involved in every step of the development process." Artiscle, Boxee and Rent the Runway are looking for interns.

QUITTING. The American Cancer Society of New York and New Jersey is introducing QuitBuddy, which will nag you, via text, to quit smoking. Text "Quit" to 22723 to receive tips and "messages of encouragement and support."

Mr. Shron

Before the meetup, students downloaded a 1.4 GB raw data set—or three million

lines of code—from 311, New York City’s information and services hotline. From there, Mr. Shron spent two hours leading students through a series of commands in the terminal program to turn what was an intimidating and unmanageable amount of unusable statistics into a revealing picture about the number and different types of complaints 311 receives from New Yorkers. 

It's starting to make sense...

Betabeat confesses that most of Mr. Shron’s presentation was way over our heads, and several students had to help get Betabeat back on track on more than one occasion. While Mr. Shron’s work is essential to OkCupid’s operations—“someone might want to know... how many lesbians there are in Topeka or something”—the only visible way users are able to see what he does is through the popular OkTrends blog that Mr. Shron helps co-founder Christian Rudder write. “Christian and I sit down and hash out how we can [realize] his vision,” Mr. Shron said. “We try to find what some basic ideas are and then I go ahead and try to reduce it down into something that’s useful for him and then he goes ahead and puts it together and writes something great out of it.” But that hasn’t happened since April when OkTrends published “10 Charts About Sex”— over nine months ago. The OkTrends blog has been inactive for nearly as long as Betabeat's LiveJournal. We pressed Mr. Shron as to when we could expect something new from OkTrends, but he wasn’t budging. "We’re working on it,” Mr. Shron said. “I can tell you that we’ve got a couple things in the pipeline, hoping to get some stuff out soon. But it’s just been a busy time at OkCupid. I’m just really happy with the success of the blog... Both of our goals is to produce something great that helps people." That and the data analysis. Mr. Shron said despite the fact that OkTrends is so popular it's not about the notoriety or exposure for him. He just loves the work. "There’s really not a lot of personal motivation in it. I know the blog is popular, but I think about it as just something I do that people happen to know about." When Mr. Shron is not working on the blog, he works on longer-term statistical and business projects, answering internal questions to calibrate the website’s functionality and creating and maintaining tools that allow him to answer those questions more easily. Mr. Shron, who used to do freelance data analysis for professors and journalists in Chicago, has been at OkCupid for about a year and a half. “I had a bunch of friends send me the job link for the OkCupid blog and I was like, ‘Oh, sounds like a good match, and they liked me,’” Mr. Shron said. “I’ve had to develop tools for dealing with the quantity of data we’ve got. It’s nice to work on things for long periods of time. Previous things I’d worked on had been maybe a couple weeks at most... it’s nice to draw those things out.” But this hiatus on blog posts has been drawn out enough. Give us something new for our chart hungry brains to snack on.

No humanity, no service.

If your recollection of the last tech bubble is kinda hazy—Netscape IPO yadda yadda Pets.com—you might have missed the hype around Nerve Personals, which first launched in the year 2000.

For New Yorkers of a certain self-selecting cultural persuasion, the dating site from Nerve.com was the first online offering that catered to their demo. By virtue of the fact that it was attached to Nerve.com, a purveyor of "literate smut," it was safe to assume you had a better chance of liking the same movies, reading the same books and not offending some poor Match.com square with your free-wheelin' politics.

A New York Times magazine feature about the romantic entanglements of Nerve's stylish co-founders Genevieve Field and Rufus Griscom, touted the popularity of its promising new personals section ("It's addictive!"). That was followed by more exposure with the HBO series Nerve.com: Downloading Sex, which featured: "a woman who keeps a digital diary of her sex life." (It's possible the word blogging had not been invented yet.)

It was around that time in 2001 that Nerve spun out the technology that powered its dating site into Spring Street Networks, which in turn sold that technology to publishers like The Onion, Gawker, and Salon.com. But when Spring Street Networks floundered, so did Nerve's personals section. Spring Street was acquired by Various, Inc., the owner of Friendfinder, and a company called FastCupid took over the management of the section and its backend in an eight-year deal. Users were less than pleased.

Meanwhile, a slew of other dating sites, from OkCupid to HowAboutWe, have stepped in to try to cater to those same online daters—not to mention the whole Grindr where-are-you-right-now-so-I-can-take-your-pants-off mobile hookup category. "We were just a private label putting our name on someone else's technology and waiting for the deal to expire so that we could do our own thing," CEO Sean Mills, who previously served as president of The Onion, told Betabeat. "We were chomping at the bit to do something different, not just from the third party technology, but from the rest of the industry. We cringe when we see some of these commercials on television for some of these big dating sites.’

Well, Nerve.com's contract with FastCupid expired this year and Mr. Mills, who helped scrub the site clean of its advertiser-unfriendly naked photo repository, has been hard at work reinventing online dating for the modern web. Their new proposition called Nerve Dating, launched out of invite-only beta  earlier this month with 10,000 users and is currently only running in New York City.

This summer the company raised a $1 million round from Lerer Ventures, FirstMark Capital, and some angel investors to develop the site, which is free to join, but requires a $20/month subscription to message users. Unlike most other paid sites, it doesn't cost anything to reply to someone who reached out first. "What you see on free dating sites is there's a filter missing and people get, you know . . . there’s a creepiness factor sometimes to what you see there," said Mr. Mills.

At least in terms of its user-interface and layout, it's the sleekest dating site we've seen. (Unlike Google Reader, they seem to understand how to use white space.) Nerve's creative team also has an interesting spin on things: no more dreaded profile to fill out. Rather daters type in status-update-like questions on what they did last night or offer opinions on lightweight questions. Where OkCupid wants you to respond to directed inquires like "How often are you open with your feelings?" to determine compatibility, Nerve asks things more along the lines of: "My favorite influential '80s art-rock band is..." or "Two truths and a lie about me are..." The questions show up in a news feed-like homepage where users have the option of privately responding to an answer.

In our first hour perusing the site, we saw references to: Momofuku's, Enid's in Greenpoint, Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens, Mark Bittman, the McKibben Lofts, The Princess Bride, the National show at the Beacon, and Frank Zappa. And yes, if you need to ask, we entered a Brooklyn zipcode.

"Rather than go to a site where you have to fill out a long profile that tends to be static, we looked at things like Twitter and Facebook where people are sharing more of what’s going on in their lives everyday, it’s more about what you’ve been up to and what you thought of it," said Mr. Mills. "What’s powerful about that is you can disagree [with their opinions], and it’s just starting a conversation."

The idea was to dispense with the equally-as-dreaded first email or IM to a stranger, which can come across as canned or forced. "What’s the more human, what’s the more authentic, natural way to approach the situation?" he added.

After looking around the rest of the $3 billion(!) online dating market, Mr. Mills figured Nerve was in a good position to once again act like an innovator, noting the gender diversity of its site, which gets 2 million unique visitors and 12 million pageviews a month. "We sort of have a different approach to lifestyle content—it's not men’s and women’s magazines. We write content that appeals to men and women. Very first person. And we try to be a little more intelligent."

All the emphasis on dating like humans seems to be directed at a certain popular free dating site run by four mathematicians. "What we’d seen is that the whole online dating space it became just dominated by gimmicks and math and science and algorithms and here’s our formula of how we’ll determine whether two people are compatible," said Mr. Mills. " These things are very enticing from a marketing standpoint, but they don’t actually work. OkCupid does really clever things with its blog posts—you’re 72 percent my enemy and all that stuff. We think attraction is a complicated thing and people can figure out for themselves whether there’s a connection."

Which is not to say that filling out scripted questions is necessarily more authentic for a dating site. In one of the question boxes, a recent user wondered, "Is Nerve going to make it? Is being so artificially indirect with each other really the best way for two people to meet online?"

But the bigger issue might be convincing the lovelorn that the Nerve name still means something in online dating. "There are these brands out there, the Onion was one, that have a really loyal following and people have kind of an emotional connection," said Mr. Mills. "Those brands can venture off-track at times, but that attachment doesn’t go away. When I started at the Onion back in the day, it was sort of in a downward trend and we revitalized it and brought in a lot of new creative energy and that’s what we’re doing here . . . Hell, even Apple is an example of that."