WASHINGTON, January 16 (RIA Novosti) Are you looking for a date with someone new but too busy (or lazy) to make it happen the traditional way?
A new mobile app rolled out in the United States this week aims to help modern, urban singles cut to the chase and set up convenient blind dates with a minimum of “getting to know you” preliminaries.
The new application, called “Crazy Blind Date,” is available for both Apple and Android smartphones and allows users to meet others at a time and public place of their choosing, revealing little information about themselves other than age, gender and sexual orientation beforehand, its makers said.
“Going on a Crazy Blind Date takes less than a minute of work,” the maker of the app, online dating site OkCupid, said in a statement cited by US media.
The new app was released Tuesday and by Wednesday it was already at 36 on the Apple iTunes most popular list – a strong showing for a new service.
The company says its new service is different from other dating websites and applications because it demands minimal time, effort and advance notice for maximum and immediate dating efficiency.
“If you ask women what they dislike most about online dating, it’s that it’s too much work,” Sam Yagan, one of the founders of OkCupid, told The New York Times. “People want instant gratification. It’s the trajectory of the industry.”
Exhaustive back-and-forth email conversations have been cited as one of Americans’ biggest qualms with online dating. To remedy this, Crazy Blind Date uses an algorithm, simple user preferences along with pixelated photos that reveal only parts of the user’s face for arranging instant dates.
These mystery meetings occur only at public locations such as cafes, restaurants and bars. And while the app does require users to upload a photo, that picture is automatically distorted to reveal only some facial features to assist users in making selections of dates.
“We’re pulling out all the photo filters and the back-and-forth and turning your life over to computers and algorithms,” Yagan told the Times.
To find a date users select the day and time they are available, along with a few suggestions on where they would like to meet.
The app then sends options back to the user that correspond with those preferences. Once a selection is made, the user receives a message to confirm time and place. A half-hour before the date is set to start, an anonymous chat window will appear so the two parties can communicate to find one another.
After the date ends, Crazy Blind Date asks users to rate how things went – and to pay 99 cents for doing so – a function that NBC News described in a story about the service as “weird.”
And just one day after its launch, the safety of Crazy Blind Date has faced question.
