Mobile Dating – Around the World
Have you ever had a mobile date? Mobile dating is the next big trend in dating. You know how cell phones can know where you are at all times? Well like other technological advancements that have gone before, this one has been co-opted into the wicked world of dating.
Mobile dating starts out like regular internet dating – which by now everyone should be familiar with. You register, you fill out your personal details (usually telling a few lies along the way), and you upload a photo taken before you got fat or lost what was left of your hair. Then you browse the profiles of others, and send messages and ‘winks’ to all the hot ones. They ignore you, and so you gradually lower your standards until someone, anyone, responds favorably to your messages. You chat for a while via email, and then set up what turns out to be a crushingly disappointing date with someone who is either way out of your league or can no longer see their feet. This is your life.
Anyway – that last bit isn’t true, because mobile dating actually diverges after the ‘upload a photo’ part. What it then does is turn your humble cell phone or PDA into a walking, talking weapon of mass seduction. Wherever you go, it broadcasts a love signal to anyone else in a certain radius of where you are. It might be the same zip code, or if your phone has Bluetooth and your service uses it, it might be within just 15 meters! Pretty crazy huh! Of course, surely if someone was that close to you, you could’ve just gone up to them and been humiliatingly rejected without the use of technology, but that’s progress for you.
The really interesting thing about the rise and rise of mobile dating technology is that its popularity is different in different parts of the world. This actually makes sense when you think about it. While you can see mobile dating being big in tech-savvy, high-density places such as New York or Los Angeles or London, people who live there already have many options. They could simply use an internet dating site for example – everyone has access to the internet and there are dozens of sites to choose from.
Consider the situation in a poorer country. Maybe not everyone has access to a broadband internet connection, and maybe social mores are such that casual dating is more or less taboo. Everyone still has a cell phone though, so mobile dating suddenly becomes much more attractive.
The fact is that you can be reasonably sure that most people in a downtown bar in New York will at least be happy to be hit on, even if they already have a partner and will reject you cruelly. In a place like Buenos Aires or Tel Aviv, this might not be the case, so having a service that discreetly broadcasts your desires to meet a single someone suddenly sounds like a very useful idea. Could mobile dating wind up as a non-US phenomenon?