1 | Zillow
384 – eBizMBA Rank | 15,000,000 – Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 211 – Compete Rank | 284 – Quantcast Rank | 657 – Alexa Rank.
Most Popular Real Estate Websites | Updated 5/1/2013 | eBizMBA

2 | Yahoo! Real Estate
433 – eBizMBA Rank | 13,500,000 – Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *400* – Compete Rank | *465* – Quantcast Rank | NA – Alexa Rank.
Most Popular Real Estate Websites | Updated 5/1/2013 | eBizMBA

3 | Trulia
521 – eBizMBA Rank | 8,000,000 – Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 246 – Compete Rank | 329 – Quantcast Rank | 987 – Alexa Rank.
Most Popular Real Estate Websites | Updated 5/1/2013 | eBizMBA

4 | Realtor
548 – eBizMBA Rank | 7,500,000 – Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 180 – Compete Rank | 617 – Quantcast Rank | 846 – Alexa Rank.
Most Popular Real Estate Websites | Updated 5/1/2013 | eBizMBA

5 | Homes
1,847 – eBizMBA Rank | 2,850,000 – Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 506 – Compete Rank | 663 – Quantcast Rank | 4,372 – Alexa Rank.
Most Popular Real Estate Websites | Updated 5/1/2013 | eBizMBA

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Tinder, the dating app for people who hate dating apps, has shown a stubborn desire to expand beyond its “hookup” reputation. In April, cofounders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen voiced intentions to extend the app’s matchmaking technology into business networking. Today the company introduced Matchmaker, a feature that it hopes will subtly broaden users’ perspectives on the app.

Accessed via the normal Tinder app, Matchmaker allows users to introduce their Facebook friends to each other. Just select two friends, add a message and press send. If that sounds like an innovation worthy of a groan, consider the status quo.

Email introductions generally work just fine for business, but if you’re doing them correctly you have to get permission before giving up a colleague’s email address. Matchmaker, the company argues, keeps sensitive contact information out of reach. For romantic introductions meanwhile, email doesn’t make any sense. Just giving away someone’s phone number rarely feels right, and looping everyone into a group text doesn’t quite work either. Of course there’s the old-fashioned method of wrangling everyone together for an in-person meetup–it worked just fine for your parents–but that’s just so analog. This is 2013 people.

“Right now introductions are a very difficult process,” explains Rad, Tinder’s 27 year-old CEO. “They’re slow, they’re socially awkward. This is socially a acceptable environment for you to make introductions in an easy way.”

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The professional social network’s navigation bar is now easier to use and more pleasant to behold.

Starting Wednesday, LinkedIn will be sporting a much sexier and simplified navigation bar inspired by the design of its just-improved mobile applications.

“Over the last year and half we’ve had the chance to learn quite a bit from you about the types of changes that add the most value to your daily professional life, and we’ve brought some of these learnings to the new navigation,” LinkedIn Principal Designer Amy Parnell wrote in blog post.

The idea is to make LinkedIn’s navigation menu on the Web not only nicer looking, but easier to use. The search field is now front and center, tabs have been cut back, and profile and account information is just a single click away.

The refreshed look also more closely matches that of LinkedIn’s redesigned mobile applications for iPhone and Android, which were released in April.

The professional network said that all English-speaking members will get the new navigation menu at some point during the next month.

Read full article here.

According to the latest data from Pew, teens find Facebook to be more an extension of their daily interactions at school and home than a place where they can relax and be themselves. The unease isn’t from concerns about third parties accessing their data, or even their parents discovering unflattering photos — it’s from the “drama” that goes along with maintaining a presence on the network, including jockeying for likes, agonizing over profile pictures, and the politicking and cliques that characterize teenage life.

Pew reports that while 77 percent of online teens are on Facebook, their experiences aren’t exactly the sharing free-for-all that the social network likes to evoke when it discusses the future of its service. Roughly half of respondents had deleted their own posts or others’ comments, or un-tagged themselves from photos. Three quarters had deleted people from their network, and 58 percent had blocked someone from contacting them. Pew writes that “while some focus group participants enjoyed using [Facebook], far more associated it with constraints through an increasing adult presence, high-pressure or otherwise negative social interactions (‘drama’), or feeling overwhelmed by others who share too much.”

But while the pressures of social life online weigh heavily on the minds of teenage social media users, third-party access to their information doesn’t seem to be a concern. Only nine percent of respondents reported being “very concerned” about third parties accessing their data. Among parents it’s a different story — 81 percent are concerned about how much information advertisers can learn about their children. And while the results could indicate a gulf in values (several people reported having “nothing to hide”), the answers seem to show a lack of understanding about what social media services are doing with their personal data.

Read more here.

Jake, a D.C. man, turned to Craigslist last week in search of a wedding date. And boy, was his search successful.

Jake told HuffPost Weddings that, after friends shared his Craigslist ad on Facebook, a woman he’d previously volunteered with at Dreams for Kids D.C. private messaged him and said she’d like to be his date.

“I’ve had a crush on her since we met almost two years ago but never acted on it,” Jake said. “We both had the time of our lives at the wedding and will be hanging out again soon.”

Take a look at photos of Jake and his date on Huff Post.

Divorcées may be looking for love in all the wrong places.

Online dating site Find Your FaceMate sets out to match prospective mates based on similar facial features, which, according to site founder Christina Bloom, is a good sign of compatibility.

“I believe that people are attracted to people with similar facial features,” Bloom said in an interview.

According to the site, scientists’ findings “prove that passion is subconsciously ignited when we spot someone whose facial features are similar to our own.”

“When we fall in love (or meet our facial feature match) the neurological response in the brain triggers a release of endorphins and other mood enhancing chemicals that puts being in love in a category all on its own,” the site continues.

But does the science work? Kerri Johnson, an assistant psychology professor at UCLA, told Good Morning America that “there is evidence that general liking improves when people look like you,” but that the research points to pairs that have similar levels of attractiveness, and not necessarily similar facial features.

In other words, the jury is out!

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Dear friends,

Dating Pro team is happy to introduce the new set of design themes, applicable to different niche ideas, starting from Christian dating, Matrimonial website, through travel companions and local communities to websites for pet lovers, and more.

Check the high quality screenshots on our Facebook page or visit the demo website and use the switcher on top of the page to see the themes in action.

We would love to hear your comments on the new design templates, ideas and suggestions.

(Reuters) – Rail passengers searching for love in the Czech capital need look no further than the daily commute as the city makes plans to designate carriages on its underground trains for singles.

Prague transport company Ropid wants to set aside carriages on some or all of its trains for singles seeking a soul mate, a service that could launch by the end of this year.

The city-owned company will start polling passengers to determine whether they would be interested.

Spokesman Filip Drapal said the initiative was one of the activities the city-owned company hoped would lure people out of their cars and onto public transportation.

“We want to emphasize that public transport is not only a means of travel but that you can do things there that you cannot do in your car,” he told Reuters.

Prague, with a population of 1.2 million, attracted 5.4 million foreign visitors in 2012 with a mix of centuries-old architecture and cobblestone streets and cheap Pilsner beer.

The city’s three metro lines span more than 59 km and transported 580 million passengers in 2011.

Read full article here.

Nigel Warren, the New York tenant who ended up in trouble with the city after renting his room out on Airbnb, just got some bad news. A judge on the city’s Environmental Control Board (ECB), which arbitrates these matters, has found Warren’s landlord guilty of violating the state’s illegal hotel law and fined him $2,400. Many Airbnb listings were already explicitly illegal in New York, but this ruling extends that illegality to cover even more types of listings.

Airbnb sent a lawyer to the hearing to argue on Warren’s behalf, the first time the startup has intervened in such a case. New York City, where Airbnb is projected to do $1 billion in sales in 2013, is an important battleground for the startup, which has run into trouble with regulators in some cities. David Hantman, Airbnb’s head of public policy, has said the company would like to make New York a “model city.”

Airbnb decried the decision and dismissed it as a case of “overzealous law enforcement officials.”

“This decision runs contrary to the stated intention and the plain text of New York law, so obviously we are disappointed,” Airbnb said in a statement. “But more importantly, this decision makes it even more critical that New York law be clarified to make sure regular New Yorkers can occasionally rent out their own homes.”

Warren rented out his room to a woman from Russia while he was in Colorado for three nights in September. He never met the guest, but his roommate, who is also on the lease, was home the whole time. Warren argued that because his roommate was home, his rental falls under one of the exemptions in the New York state law that regulates illegal hotels. A judge said that because he and his roommate never had contact with the guest, the exemption did not apply.

This is a new interpretation of a law that took effect in 2011, aimed at tenants who convert residential property into full-time illegal hotels. State representatives say the practice decreases the already low stock of housing in the city; the law was also supported by neighborhood associations and the hotel lobby.

The law seems to include an exemption for hosts who rent out an extra room or couch to a “lawful boarder” for less than 30 days, but remain in the dwelling while the guest is there. Because Warren’s roommate was home while his Russian boarder was there, he argued that the exemption should apply. However, the judge interpreted the terms “boarders and lodgers” in the law to mean “occupants who share the life of the dwelling with its permanent occupants” and not to “complete strangers who have no, and are not intended to have any, relationship with the permanent occupant.” Because the Russian visitor did not interact with Warren or his roommate, the judge said, the exemption should not apply.

Read more here.

YouLike, a startup backed by the founders of Turkish eBay clone GittiGidiyor, describes itself as an interest-based social network and dating site that takes into account a user’s dislikes, as much as what they do like, when helping to find like-minded people to friend or date.

Unlike a lot of other dating sites that ask you to fill out a lengthy and data-heavy questionnaire or simply pen an open-ended profile, YouLike presents a series of fun questions ranging from what activities you love or hate, your food and entertainment tastes, or your relationship preferences. Each question requires a simple multiple choice response — “love”, “like”, “dislike”, “hate”, or “skip” — which forms the basis for how YouLike matches users.

This home-grown approach to generating a user’s interest graph is also intended to produce less so-called dirty data that simply importing a user’s Facebook ‘Likes’ (a technique used by other dating sites and interest-based social networks) can produce. Not only is the site intentionally starting out clean, but Zuckerberg’s social network famously lacks a ‘Dislike’ button, which for YouLike’s match-making purposes would only tell half the story. After all, they do say that opposites attract.

So, for example, YouLike might ask a user to rate an activity related to “cooking” or “shopping”, or to express their disposition to “waking up early” or “never being late”. Other questions drill down to a user’s dating preferences more explicitly, such as “a guy should always make the first move” or whether or not “kissing on the first date” is the done thing.

This data is then employed when visiting another user’s profile. Members can compare their rated likes and dislikes with those of a prospective match. The results are displayed as “you both like”, “you both dislike”, “you like but he/she dislikes”, and “you dislike but he/she likes”.

Read full article here.