Remember online dating? Gosh, that seems so last century. An iPhone application which allows cruising gay men to locate one another instantly using Global Positioning System technology is now spreading to the heterosexual market.
This latest rage in online romance is called Grindr. Grindr is a free, downloadable iPhone app that lets you find “gay, bi, curious guys near you.” It’s sort of a sexual version of toptable — an iPhone app that allows you to search for all the restaurants offering a certain cuisine in your immediate vicinity. Similarly, Grindr provides a grid of who else in your neighborhood is using Grindr, what they look like and — tantalizingly — exactly how far away they are from you, measured in feet. If there’s mutual interest, you can begin to “chat” and . . . who knows? The night is young.
Grindr has been hugely popular since its release in March 2009. There are now more than 700,000 men in 162 countries using Grindr, with 2,000 downloading it every day. A BlackBerry-friendly version was launched last month. It’s so popular that its creator — the 33-year-old American-born Joel Simkhai — will be releasing a “straight version” by the end of the year targeted at heterosexuals.
Read the rest of this article at www.PoliticsDaily.com…
Image: i-Blue GPS 757 logger and TOKompass midlet via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
July 8, 2010, 7:27 pm
This stuff fascinates me – Thank you for sharing.
I reviewed Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book Committed today, because I see such new trends is marriage more driven by economics than meaning or companionship…I gave it 5 stars.
July 9, 2010, 1:36 am
Read the lst part of the article on your blog, but as soon as I tried (3x)to click to PD, I was switched back to this blog. Could it be because you did not include in your instructions to “continue” you did not have the usual underline and/or color emphasis spot to click? Puzzledly yours —
July 9, 2010, 5:32 pm
2nd reply: yes, well. . .some of us are just too damn old. And just thrilled to hear that all this s. .ahem. . . stuff. . .may be leading to yet another uptake in sds.