There are many reasons people fall for each other: Personality, looks, humor . But a new class of GPS-enabled smartphone apps is trying to bring dating back to the pure, data-driven basics.
Latitude and longitude.
In this new era of app-driven love, location is most important.
Take, for example, the story of Scott Kutcher and Amanda Segal. They started dating in March when, during a Jay-Z concert at Madison Square Garden, Scott pulled out his iPhone, opened an app called Skout and scanned a list of near-by women.
A grid of photos showed women who, at that very moment, were within a certain radius of Scott and his GPS-enabled phone.
And at the top of that list: Amanda, who was at the same show.
“It just so happened she was the closest one and she’s cute,” he said, noting that the app told him she was less than 1,000 feet away.
Scott and Amanda exchanged instant messages through the app. Amanda thought Scott was funny. She also liked the Ninja Turtles hat he wore in his profile picture. So the pair agreed to meet up for coffee after the show, and Amanda brought some of her friends along, just to be safe.
“He could have been a serial killer,” she said. “I lucked out.”
The two are now dating exclusively, and they credit the love-the-one-you’re-near philosophy of Skout with setting them up.
Above all, it was convenient, they said.
“I wasn’t going to go out of my way — at all. I really wasn’t,” Amanda said of her willingness to search out a person to date. “I was like, ‘Oh we’re at the same place, why not discuss the show?'”
While established online dating services like eHarmony and Match.com go to painstaking lengths to match daters based on their exhaustive surveys of likes and dislikes, this new crop of GPS-based dating apps seems fixated largely on two qualities in potential mates: Proximity and convenience.
Apps like Skout, Grindr and StreetSpark let people sort through lists of potential daters based on where they are located at any given moment. All three services list the distance between the person using the app and other member users in feet.
If a person is listed as zero feet away, for instance, you might glance up from your seat at a coffee shop to see that person hanging out across the room. The apps tend not to say exactly where a person is located, and, on Skout and Grindr, you can turn off the location-aware feature if you choose.
