App Spotlight: Tinder: The Spicy New App That Could Get You A Date (Even in Regina)

Perhaps one of the spicier apps catching on these days is Tinder.

Overview:
Tinder is simple. It connects you with people around you, whether you know them or not, lets you decide if you want to connect with them based on their appearance, interests, and mutual friends, and then allows you to chat with them if you’re a “match”. You become a match if they, while unaware of your interest or lack of interest in them, decide that they want to connect with you. The concept sounds a lot like what Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker were trying to accomplish with their under-utilized Airtime creation but with more emphasis on what is loosely referred to as “dating”.

The User Experience:
Users upload up to five pictures of themselves and have the option to write a short tagline that will appear under them. Mutual friends and interests are drawn from Facebook profiles. You can set your matching preferences for the categories of age, gender, and search distance (to a maximum of 100 miles). The fun begins when you click on Recommendations and the first profile pops up.

At this time, you can click the photo to view the others and then make a decision on whether or not you want to invite this person to connect. You have to make this decision to discard them into an abyss, never to be seen again, or save them before viewing the next profile. The allure and thrill come from the feeling, real or contrived, that you’re tempting fate with each dismissal swipe to the left or approval swipe to the right.

The Evaluation:
What some might immediately dismiss as a meat market of sorts actually has some draw to it. The problem at this point is that very few people in the Regina area are using it, meaning you’ll quickly run out of match recommendations and have to check back every few days to see if any newcomers match your criteria. The value of this app for a business is extremely minimal or non-existent since it lacks the premise of meeting new people for the idea of knowledge-sharing and relationship-building in a business context. My initial thought is that an app could make a road trip into a strange new city a bit more exciting depending on your selectiveness. This app has the potential to take off as more users get it.

Overall Rating: 6/10