BOSTON GLOBE - Aug 5 - OkCupid Locals is meant to follow you wherever you go and find you matches along the way. “Mobile dating has created a new promise, an enticing one,” says Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder HowAboutWe. “When you see these people on your phone, you think, ‘This person is real, they’re near me, and I may actually be able to encounter them in the real world". Grindr was the first app of its kind to get traction. By March 2012, Grindr had 4M users in 192 countries. MeetMoi, which came online as an iPhone and Android app in 2010, alerts users when another MeetMoi user is nearby. SinglesAroundMe, also released in 2010, features a singles-locator map of sorts. OkCupid launched its Locals app in 2011. Sam Yagan, founder of OkCupid, says two-thirds of its mobile users activate the GPS-positioning info. Mark Brooks, a consultant to Internet dating sites, points out that men tend to use location-based dating features more than women, and that location-based dating apps are most often used by singles in big cities. What’s more, the singles that use them are using them all the time. “People don’t view as many pages on their mobile dating apps as they do when they’re looking at profiles at home, but they’re logging in as many as eight times a day,” says Brooks. Mark Brooks jokes that one reason location-based dating hasn’t yet gone mainstream is that there are too many men running the sites. Match is the only major dating site run by a woman, and its CEO, Mandy Ginsberg, has said the company won’t rely on location-based tools. Robinne Burrell, the company’s director of mobile product and distribution, says its experts don’t believe the location-based approach puts singles on the path to long-term relationships.
by Brooke Lea Foster
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