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rfmcdonaldThis, described in The Guardian, has the potential to be quite interesting.
I'll not be getting the app anytime soon because I'm not interested in its premise and I've a personal dislike for Apple, but it certainly has a lot of interesting potential for meeting new people, and not necessarily for hookups. Will this work in the same way for straight women, though?
A further refinement of Grindr might be to let people know if others of similar interests are walking about. Certainly being able to strike up a conversation with someone you've a potential interest in would help quite a lot.
Grindr is going straight. The mobile app that helps gay men track their nearest potential date is launching a new service that will allow women to turn their mobiles into GPS-powered dating tools.
Joel Simkhai, Grindr's 33-year-old founder, said he had received tens of thousands of requests from women asking for a straighter, female-friendly version of Grindr. Project X, which will be named in the next few weeks, will be very different to the gay version. "Proximity is less of a turn-on for women than it is for men," said Simkhai.
But Simkhai said location would still be the service's key selling point. "This desire to meet is not just a gay thing. We are all social creatures. But men and women are different. Grindr was made for a man. If we are going to bring women in to this we have to do things differently." He said he hoped to launch the new app in "the very near future".
Simkhai said Grindr would work for straight men as it is, if it were populated by straight women. "The way their minds work is pretty much the same," he said. "For gay men just the fact that there is someone 400ft away and gay is interesting." But the new app will incorporate specific features to appeal to women. "For a straight woman, a guy who is 400ft away from her? So what. It happens all the time. We have got to provide more," he said. "Grindr is very photo-centric. Women obviously want to see someone that they might find attractive, but they need to know more than that."
[. . .]
Grindr now has more than 1.5 million gay members and is available on smartphones including iPhone, BlackBerry and Android mobiles. London has the most Grindr users in the world, ahead of New York and Los Angeles. Users sign up with a photo and the barest of stats – age, height, weight. No graphic nudity is allowed. Once you sign on, the app presents a grid of pictures of potential dates sorted by proximity using GPS technology accurate to a couple of hundred feet. People interested in meeting can text each other or send more photos using the app.
The app has become a gay phenomenon. Blog The New Gay called Grindr the "biggest change in gay hookups since the 'hanky code'".
"I don't know about that," said Simkhai. "It certainly has allowed new possibilities," he said, adding that the service had removed the guesswork from spotting fellow gay men. "You walk into a new room and you can find out who is gay. I was in London recently, and when I landed at Heathrow I was on Grindr. I didn't have to figure out who was gay. Every time you go somewhere new, you have a new set of guys."
I'll not be getting the app anytime soon because I'm not interested in its premise and I've a personal dislike for Apple, but it certainly has a lot of interesting potential for meeting new people, and not necessarily for hookups. Will this work in the same way for straight women, though?
A further refinement of Grindr might be to let people know if others of similar interests are walking about. Certainly being able to strike up a conversation with someone you've a potential interest in would help quite a lot.
