Miranda Levitt was gushing about her new guy. His name was Todd, she told a girlfriend one day this summer, and he was so great—a director, older, established. The 26-year-old New York actress kept enthusing until her friend, with a dawning sense of recognition, cut her off: What’s his name again? The same “great guy” had been asking her out for a week on Tinder.
“My first reaction is like, ‘What the f--- is Tinder?’ ” Levitt says. “So of course I downloaded it and proceeded to play on it like it was a video game for weeks.”
Tinder, as Levitt learned, is not a website. It’s a pathologically addictive flirting-dating-hookup app. The first step in using it is to sign in with your Facebook ID, which gives Tinder your name, age, photos, and sexual orientation. There is no second step. You’re immediately shown the face of a person of your preferred sex, and, again, there’s only one thing to do: Swipe right if you like what you see, swipe left if you don’t. Another face instantly appears for appraisal, and then another.
Tinder feels like a game until you remember that the people behind those faces are swiping you back. If, and only if, both parties like each other, a private chat box appears. You could conceivably have a conversation. You could make a date. Or you could simply meet for sex, minutes after Tinder’s algorithms matched your profiles. One year after launching, Tinder’s hordes have swipe-rated each other 13 billion times—3 billion in August alone—and 2 million matches happen each day. It’s the fastest-growing free dating app in the U.S.
The average Tinderer checks the app 11 times per day, seven minutes at a time. The company says it knows of 50 marriage proposals to date. Levitt cannot escape it. “Last night I was out with a friend,” she says. At the bar there was a guy, and things were going well. “I go to the bathroom, and when I come back I look over at his phone and Tinder is up! I was like, ‘Are you kidding?!’ And he was like, ‘No, I mean, someone matched me, and I’m checking it!’ I was like, ‘OK, dude.’ ”
Levitt makes an exasperated noise. “It’s being integrated into my life as a twentysomething a lot more than I thought it would be,” she says.
Like the monster in Alien, Tinder may be a perfectly evolved organism, a predator for your attention built on the DNA of its social networking predecessors. The faces you see on Tinder seem real because they’re tied to Facebook accounts, the gold standard of authenticity. Tinder takes the gay app Grindr’s location function, which pinpoints eager men down to the foot, and tames it for a female audience, rounding distance to the nearest mile. You can chat with Tinder matches, but you can’t send photos or video, so the app avoids Chatroulette’s fate of being overrun by aspiring Anthony Weiners.
What makes Tinder truly killer, though, is that it was designed exclusively for smartphones and the hypersocial millennials who wield them. Although online dating has long since lost its stigma, OkCupid and EHarmony remain sites you browse alone at home, with a fortifying glass of wine and a spreadsheet to track interactions. Tinder is an app you pull up at a bar with friends, passing the iPhone around.
by Nick Summers, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image: Gallery Stock
“My first reaction is like, ‘What the f--- is Tinder?’ ” Levitt says. “So of course I downloaded it and proceeded to play on it like it was a video game for weeks.”Tinder, as Levitt learned, is not a website. It’s a pathologically addictive flirting-dating-hookup app. The first step in using it is to sign in with your Facebook ID, which gives Tinder your name, age, photos, and sexual orientation. There is no second step. You’re immediately shown the face of a person of your preferred sex, and, again, there’s only one thing to do: Swipe right if you like what you see, swipe left if you don’t. Another face instantly appears for appraisal, and then another.
Tinder feels like a game until you remember that the people behind those faces are swiping you back. If, and only if, both parties like each other, a private chat box appears. You could conceivably have a conversation. You could make a date. Or you could simply meet for sex, minutes after Tinder’s algorithms matched your profiles. One year after launching, Tinder’s hordes have swipe-rated each other 13 billion times—3 billion in August alone—and 2 million matches happen each day. It’s the fastest-growing free dating app in the U.S.
The average Tinderer checks the app 11 times per day, seven minutes at a time. The company says it knows of 50 marriage proposals to date. Levitt cannot escape it. “Last night I was out with a friend,” she says. At the bar there was a guy, and things were going well. “I go to the bathroom, and when I come back I look over at his phone and Tinder is up! I was like, ‘Are you kidding?!’ And he was like, ‘No, I mean, someone matched me, and I’m checking it!’ I was like, ‘OK, dude.’ ”
Levitt makes an exasperated noise. “It’s being integrated into my life as a twentysomething a lot more than I thought it would be,” she says.
Like the monster in Alien, Tinder may be a perfectly evolved organism, a predator for your attention built on the DNA of its social networking predecessors. The faces you see on Tinder seem real because they’re tied to Facebook accounts, the gold standard of authenticity. Tinder takes the gay app Grindr’s location function, which pinpoints eager men down to the foot, and tames it for a female audience, rounding distance to the nearest mile. You can chat with Tinder matches, but you can’t send photos or video, so the app avoids Chatroulette’s fate of being overrun by aspiring Anthony Weiners.
What makes Tinder truly killer, though, is that it was designed exclusively for smartphones and the hypersocial millennials who wield them. Although online dating has long since lost its stigma, OkCupid and EHarmony remain sites you browse alone at home, with a fortifying glass of wine and a spreadsheet to track interactions. Tinder is an app you pull up at a bar with friends, passing the iPhone around.
by Nick Summers, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image: Gallery Stock
