I’m stoked (excuse the pun) to announce that we have acquired the Crushes Facebook app. As part of the deal, the application’s creator, Patrick Stokes, will join Buddy Media as a senior programmer working out of our New York City office. Terms of the deal have not been released.

The addition of Crushes to Buddy Media’s application portfolio gives the company one of the leading pure-play dating applications on Facebook. More than a million Facebook users have installed Crushes and 30,000 use the service each day. Crushes will be combined with Buddy Media’s Matches app, which currently has more than 230,000 installs. Buddy Media will also integrate AceBucks into the application.

Patrick is a great addition to our team. He is a 27 year old native “Jersey Guy” and web developer. After working with IBM during and after college, Patrick quickly learned that the large corporate environment was not for him. Patrick took a job at JK Design, a small web design firm in New Jersey. He started off as a part time freelancer and eventually became the company’s lead developer.

During his time at JK Design, Patrick started working long hard hours after his day job on side projects for itMayBe Media LLC, a small business that he started with good friend and elbo.ws creator, Brandon Griffiths. When Facebook announced their developers platform Patrick quickly jumped on board and wrote 4cast Weather, which in the course of 2 months had 250,000 users and had surpassed it’s competitors as the most used weather application on Facebook, as well as one of the most used “utility” apps on Facebook. Shortly after, Patrick wrote Crushes.

Welcome aboard Patrick!