Mobile Dating Report

Mobile Dating: A Case Study

Zachary Kingston is a 27-year-old trainee antiques dealer and man-about-town, the town being, in this case, Manhattan. With blond hair and soft good looks, it’s hard to imagine Zachary going home alone after a night on the tiles no matter what he did, but the man himself professes to shyness: “I just can’t walk up to a girl in a bar and start talking, like some guys can,” he admits. “Mobile dating gave me a great option for effectively breaking the ice before that first meeting.”

One night in late May Zachary was headed to a downtown bar, Establishment, to meet up with a couple of his buddies. Unfortunately (or fortunately), he got stood up, but not wanting the night to end so early, he decided to stay out and give mobile dating a try. Enter Samantha Morton, a 25-year-old accounts payable clerk for a major international bank, who was out for a quiet cocktail “or three” with one of her girlfriends at a bar in a nearby area.

It was just a few minutes work for Zachary to take out his Blackberry, find Samantha’s profile on a mobile dating service, and send her a message suggesting they meet up for a quick drink.

Now dating for four months, Zachary and Samantha can’t say enough good things about mobile dating:

“I’ve recommended mobile dating to all my friends,” says Samantha, a voluptuous former resident of Kingston, South Africa. “They all know it’s how I met Zachary – these days, it’s not such a big deal to meet someone using a dating service, like it used to be.”

With mobile dating set to grow year-on-year by big numbers, industry experts agree that it’s the next big trend in the dating technology marketplace.

“Mobile dating is the big buzz story of dating service technology in the late 2000s,” says Emmanuel Mellon, an analyst with marketing and creative agency Richardson, Brown and Johnson. “While it couldn’t have existed without internet dating coming along before it and popularizing the general concept, we believe that mobile dating will eventually capture a large percentage of the market share that internet dating currently holds. The future is very, very bright for the early players in this market, who have a great opportunity to establish a big foothold in the hearts and minds of potential users in the 20-to-30-something demographic.”

Whatever the future holds for mobile dating, it’s clear from case studies such as Zachary’s that mobile dating works for some, and for that reason alone it’s here to stay. “I think mobile dating is going to be the way of the future,” Zachary told us. “I know that there are plenty of nice guys out there like me, who struggle with the confidence you need to just start talking to a woman who’s with her friends in a noisy bar or club. Unfortunately, what this means is that the guys who are having all the success with the ladies are the cocky jerks, who end up treating women badly and giving all us guys a bad name,” he opined. “I think mobile dating will help more nice guys get with nice ladies, and I’m all for that!”

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).