Estab­lished dat­ing out­fits could be in line for a shake­up if new start-up Tin­der gets its way.
In a move bound to excite the inter­est of social media man­agers and con­tent man­agers, the LA-based firm aims to exploit the tech­no-savvy of the mobile gen­er­a­tion while remov­ing the “creep fac­tor” that dat­ing sites are so often asso­ci­at­ed with.

Fos­ter­ing the love connection

Rather than pub­lish swathes of detail about indi­vid­u­als, Tin­der adopts a more sub­tle approach. The iOS app links you to oth­er peo­ple in a 50-mile radius who – based on the infor­ma­tion sup­plied from shared Face­book friends, net­works and inter­ests – it thinks you might like to get in touch with.

At this point, many of its com­peti­tors would swamp each par­ty with inti­mate infor­ma­tion about the oth­er; but Tin­der’s approach is to allow users to ‘like’ a pro­file with com­plete anonymi­ty and move on to the next pos­si­ble match with­out too much dam­age done. Match­es are made by a points scor­ing sys­tem gen­er­at­ed from the infor­ma­tion the app col­lects, but this not a sta­t­ic process designed to assem­ble a one off pro­file. Instead the app responds to user behav­iour over time and makes sug­ges­tions accord­ing­ly. Per­haps most cru­cial­ly, nei­ther par­ty can con­tact the oth­er unless they have both declared an explic­it interest.

Mak­ing mobile dat­ing work 

Tin­der CEO Sean Rad is on record as say­ing he believes that Tin­der’s low-key approach to dat­ing is one of the rea­sons why col­lege stu­dents are find­ing it so appeal­ing and the fig­ures appear to back him up.  The ini­tial pilot was tri­alled on col­lege cam­pus­es – a prime site for prospec­tive daters. The result­ing fig­ure of 1 mil­lion match­es and 35 mil­lion pro­file rat­ings were gen­er­at­ed in less than two months, leav­ing some to sus­pect that Tin­der’s approach to ana­lyt­ics is cut­ting a path straight to the secret of social media dat­ing success.