On Friday, the awesome Laurie Davis of eFlirtExpert featured us in her eFlirt Toolbox newsletter—you can think of it as a handy guide to upping your “digital swagger” on a weekly basis. (Pro-tip: sign up stat so you don’t miss next week’s edition).

But instead of just raving about Clique (okay, she did that too; see note about awesomeness above), she pinned us against another hot new dating start-up called DuoDater, based in Silicon Valley. We’re in a heated Beta Battle, and we need your votes to show them who’s boss!

Show your Clique (and NYC!) pride by voting here and we’ll share the results when they’re announced. We’ve got this in the bag…

Spotted a hottie on Clique this week? Well good news, now you can give them a virtual high five! When you’re browsing profiles, click on the hand icon in the tools or below the photo and we’ll send that person an email letting them know you’re interested. Just think of it as a wink or a nudge to get someone’s attention.

Happy high fiving! And happy Friday!

Clique is looking for an engineer to join our team in a leadership
role. Our site is built and was beta launched in February, opened up
to the public in April. Since then we’ve been talking to users,
mocking up new feature designs, and looking at where we want to go
next. Our new engineer should be excited to take the lead on some big
product development, and really take ownership of our runway.

A bit of information on Clique: Clique is a dating site that connects
friends of friends. It’s how you meet people at a party, brought
online. We include those in relationships—dubbed “wingmen”—to set up
friends as well. We’re aiming to make Clique both a matchmaking
platform and a truly social online dating network. And we want you to
take the journey with us! We’ve gotten some great press from the likes
of Mashable, Business Insider, Huffington Post, The Next Web and Time
Out New York, among others.

We’re raising a seed round right now, but want someone committed as we
enter formal talks. This means that no work on the project would begin
until we close the round (late summer). Details will be disclosed upon initial
conversations, along with more information on us, the founders.

Full qualifications are below. Want to learn more? Email Christy at christy@letsclique.com.

Summary
Clique is seeking a full-time Ruby on Rails engineer to develop and
maintain the new iteration of our web platform. Clique is an online
dating startup that matches potential dates through their mutual
friends.

Qualifications
* Significant professional experience building web applications in
Ruby and Rails
* Comfort working at all layers of the web stack, from the database
through the application to client-side behavior with jQuery and
presentation with CSS.
* User-focused development ethic; desire to take active role in
product design and implement new features autonomously.

Current status of project
Clique has been live since February 2011, and has a growing and active
user base. The application was built by our technical cofounder; the
code is clean and maintainable, and comes with a robust unit test
suite. The following technologies are used:

* Ruby 1.9
* Rails 3
* PostgreSQL
* MongoDB
* Redis
* jQuery
* LESS (for CSS abstraction)

Thanks to all of our super-connectors who came out to celebrate with us. It was a magical summer evening! Check out the rest of the photos.

Quality dating events are hard to come by. They’re either super awkward, way too cheesy or, frankly, a little intimidating. Luckily our buds over at Urban Girl Squad, a cool NYC networking group for women, has dreamed up the perfect event: A friend-of-a-friend singles party! The concept is simple: Girls, grab your best male friend and bring him along to meet the cute Urban Girl Squad members—and they will do the same. Guys, simply get a lady pal to sign up with you and let the mingling begin. It’s exactly how Clique works, brought offline. The trivia-themed soiree is set for June 16th at Pranna in Midtown Manhattan.

Snag your tickets here. And don’t forget to say hello to us at the event!

Growing your network on Clique is important, so we want to make it as easy as possible to invite your friends. We’ve developed two new ways for you to now do so on our invitation page. Here’s the rundown:

1.) Invitation links

Click the links in the left rail and post an invite on your Facebook wall or tweet one out to your followers. Anyone who signs up using your invitation link will automatically be your friend on Clique. This way you can reach your friends in your existing social networks with just one invite. We’ve autofilled the text, but you can easily edit it or add more.

2.) Import Gmail contacts

Before you start sending out invites, import your Gmail contacts. Just select the contacts you want to invite (or use the search box) and the names and email addresses will populate in your invitations. You can write a personal message if you want. Then you just have to hit send!

So spread the word and invite all of your friends. It’s no coincidence we rolled these amazing features out with just one week to our Super-Connector Contest Party! Get the most friends to join and we’ll see you at our upcoming rooftop soiree.

Be a super-connector and get invited to our summer party!

Watch our demo from this month’s NYTM.

A sneak peek from our first photo shoot! Thanks to our lovely photographer, Briana E. Heard and all of our models.

We know we always say we’ve got a “big announcement” (hey, we’re a little biased over here!), but today’s really is pretty darn significant. In fact, we feel the change we just made is one that will affect the entire trajectory of Clique—for the better.

Today, we’re removing our invite-only policy and allowing anyone who wants to join become a member. Since our launch, we’ve seen people from all over the world express interest in joining; we’ve even had people offer to lead launches in new cities. It’s been exciting, humbling and thought-provoking. We asked ourselves: If people want to be on Clique, why are we shutting them out?

The reason we’ve been holding on so tightly to our invite-only model is that the value of the site is only as great as the user’s Clique network. By joining with an invitation, you’ve already got at least one friend on the site—and therefore a network of dates. By joining without one, there is a chance that you won’t have any friends on the site to start with, and therefore, no dates. 

But we soon realized our users had a counter argument: Let me build my network myself. Every social network starts with a base of users who don’t have friends initially; but over time, the network grows and they eventually will.

And so now, anyone can begin building their Clique network.

Though this change won’t affect our current users—in fact, you’ll experience the site in the same way you did before—it will significantly change the way everyone else uses it. Anyone can join and begin inviting friends. When those friends join, they can invite friends, and the dating pools continue to grow.

This change was probably obvious and somewhat inevitable to everyone outside of the Clique team. The hardest part of beginning a venture is seeing what your users see, but what you cannot see yourself. So welcome to Clique, World. We’re excited to have you.