Mobile Dating: different strokes for different folks
If you’ve never heard of mobile dating, we’re here to tell you that it’s the next big thing in the dating world. First a bit of a history lesson: before email, cell phones, and the internet, the dating world was dominated by landline phones, personals ads in newspapers, and (most shocking of all) face-to-face interactions between strangers at social gathering places like bars and parties. Crazy, no? But the latter years of the 20th century brought with it many technological innovations relating to communication. Inventions like the fax machine and the answering machine certainly had their place in the dating world, but it was really the aforementioned trio of email, cell phones, and the internet that changed dating forever.
What these communication innovations have in common is basically that they allow people, who naturally feel some anxiety about making the first move in a situation of possible romance, to initiate contact with strangers while maintaining a bit of distance. Sending a largely anonymous email or internet dating ‘wink’ requires a lot less courage (and a lot less alcohol, though that can still help) than fronting up to stranger in a bar or nightclub.
So what about mobile dates? The basic idea here for most of the services currently available is to take internet dating and make it more quick, mobile and immediate. So rather than logging on from home, browsing profiles, sending messages and waiting a day or two for replies, mobile dating seeks to get people together who are already in a similar location.
Not every service that offers mobile dates is the same though. Some services still act more or less like traditional mobile dating services, just optimized for the small screens of cell phone handsets – they are more about photos and sending ‘winks’. Some of these, such as Match.com, are offered by companies that already offered internet dating services, so it’s maybe only natural that they work the way they do. Essentially, these types of services are just allowing you to do your internet dating from anywhere, instead of only from in front of your PC at home or at work (shhh don’t tell the boss!).
The other types of services that offer mobile dates are quite different, and much more worthy of being recognized as a new dating phenomenon. Basically they are all about proximity, as discussed above. Users register and upload a short profile, and then allow the service to track where they are. When one user comes into proximity with another user (note that the distance required for ‘proximity’ can differ from service to service), the service compares their profiles, and if there is a match, sends an alert to both parties to let them know, and invite them to communicate.
What enables this is the cell phone itself, which (so long as it is turned on) is always in communication with the nearest cell phone site (i.e. the fixed antenna through which cell phone calls and message are received and sent).