Today is the 1st April, which is famously known around the world as April Fools’ Day – the day where up until 12pm, people around the world can get away with pranking each other at no expense. And so, here at GDI, we have been tracking the April Fools’ antics of some of the most popular online dating services.
Check out the best online dating-related practical jokes of this year below.
TrueView
Kicking off the April Fools’ shenanigans was TrueView’s announcement of an online dater’s “dream” service – a digital sidekick tool which uses the company’s patent-pending “Augmented-BlueNFC-Face-Recon-GEO-Flirt” technology to scan people’s faces and let users know if they are single.
Speaking about TrueView‘s fake venture, co-founder Matt Verity said: “We stopped and took a long hard look at the online dating landscape as a whole. The problem we felt is that it has become more fragmented than ever before.
“So many people are on so many different services. You have to get swipe ache, constantly walk the streets or even grow a beard to get noticed.
“We thought how about we take a slightly different approach and allow people to discover all the single people, across all the different services in real time.
“We want people to see SideKick as a genuinely helpful tool whilst you are in the environment where you are most likely to meet that special someone and give them the confidence they need to start a conversation.”
Zoosk
In-keeping with its April Fools’ Day tradition, popular dating site Zoosk announced it was launching a brand new dating site to help you “Meat Your Burrito Soulmate!”
In a blog post, Zoosk unveiled Burrit-Oh, the spoof site that matches people based on their true burrito compatibility, using its eHarmony-ribbing 32 Ingredients framework to pair up users.
We just launched a new dating site today! Meat your other half here: https://t.co/G4fFNAiooKpic.twitter.com/ishyaCXpij
– Zoosk (@Zoosk) April 1, 2016
Speaking about its new dating service, Robin Keller, Zoosk Senior Engineer said: “It calculates what percentage of burrito match you are based on how you fill out the 32 items in your burrito order.
“It’s not like we’re doing the work of Harvard grads or anything, but I learned percentages in middle school and they’re a pretty effective tool for this sort of thing.”
The Inner Circle
Exclusive dating platform The Inner Circle also got in on the fun with one of our favourites of the day – creating a pop-up message that appeared when users logged in, telling them the company was deleting accounts as a result of growing too fast, and to try and save their membership they had to select “Paper”, “Scissors” or “Stone”.
After choosing, users were alerted they had made the wrong choice with a message that read: “Your account has been deleted. As a result of our extensive growth in London we are now removing 33% of our members. Sorry to see you go and good luck on Tinder,” before revealing the joke in the next screen.
Shaadi.com
Online wedding service Shaadi.com also duped its users into thinking they were launching a new high-tech wearable that can find users their perfect match.
This morning, the site posted on its blog that it was releasing LoveBit, a wristband that uses biometric technology to monitor your pulse rate and heartbeat and determine how much you are attracted to somebody.
After a few hours, the site then took to Twitter to reveal it wasn’t launching LoveBit, notifying its 2m users they had been April Fooled.
If U believed we’re soon launching ‘LoveBit’ we just want to tell U tht U Have Been Fooled #HappyAprilFoolsDay! #lolpic.twitter.com/hW5WPB83Gf
– Shaadi.com (@ShaadiDotCom) April 1, 2016
Nissan
This year, car manufacturer Nissan also took inspiration from the world of modern dating apps to pull off an April Fools’ prank, the company announcing its N-Connect app, a dating service for Nissan drivers it described as “Australia’s #1 Automotive Dating App”.
It also published details about the app’s functionality, adding weight to the joke by creating a selection of fake N-Connect success stories.
Let us know which one was your favourite in the comments below, and check out the best of last year’s online dating April Fools’ pranks by visiting our roundup here.