Ten reasons why you must date using an app

The integration of social media into online dating creates a level of authenticity and accountability that didn't exist before. The elimination of anonymity makes it safe and accessible, and even turns it into a social activity where your friends are involved. This makes it a more natural process reflective of dating the old-fashioned way - meeting through friends rather than having encounters with random strangers.

1. Personalised curation: Social networks give social dating apps the ability to generate as well as personalise curation for their users by knowing the types of people in their extended social circles.

2. Highly-relevant matches: Social networks have given social dating apps the ability to generate highly relevant matches for their users. Your friends are a good indication of the types of people you're drawn to and hence pooling friends of friends, and their friends' results in people with whom you share a lot in common.

3. Exclusivity: Social networks allows for "in-network" dating apps that introduce users to people within their social circles instead of random people nearby.

4. Transparency: Social networks help validate information like education, workplace, and mutual friends by pulling information directly from social networks like Facebook.

5. Trust: Related to transparency, you'll feel more comfortable actually meeting up with someone about whom you already have credible information. Plus, if you have a mutual friend you can get the scoop in advance. A positive word of mouth that results from trust helps attract additional users, so it can aid bringing in more users. Trust is not just a feel-good concept. There’s real return on investment from building trust.

6. Accountability: Social dating apps provide a sense of accountability for users. Any bad behavior could get reported back to friends or colleagues - so users of social dating apps tend to act accordingly.

7. Easy sign-up: Social networks make it extremely easy to create online or app profiles.  Instead of answering dozens of interview like questions, applications like ours put all the user information from Facebook - allowing for a one-click sign-up process.

8. Smarter algorithm: Social platforms are constantly gaining new information.  By matching users through social networks, social dating apps are able to see which friends users are most likely to match with or through. As we use the web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail.

These days, linger over a web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion. These are just basic examples of the growth of "Web intelligence", as increasingly sophisticated algorithms operate on the vast and growing amount of data on the Web, sifting, selecting, comparing, aggregating, correcting; following simple but powerful rules to decide what matters.

9. Access: Social gives people access to a broader network of people they otherwise wouldn't have had the chance to connect with or even meet.

10. Fun: The social aspect of dating reminds people that dating should be fun. Not lonely. You can meet people outside of your constrained social circle with similar interests. You'll meet more people, so you can learn what you're truly looking for in a date or a relationship.

For more, see Hinge.