Robotic Love: The Future of Dating is Mobile

It’s a humid summer night on U Street and you’re at the latest nightlife spot — think Patty Boom Boom — listening to the dancehall vibes with a couple of friends. You check in to one of your location-based social networks, and see what other technophiles came to throw down on the floor. The spot is simmering with beautiful women and you want to approach one of them and start up a dancing tête-à-tête. Some girls are dancing with a small group of friends, but who is more than a friend? Or even worse, "it’s complicated"?

Rather than play out a primitive conquest of trial and error, you pull out your Smartphone and use the built-in camera to size up the room. Each snap is cross-referenced to social networking profiles on the Web (Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, etc.) and pretty soon you’re matching random strangers in the club to their digital footprint. You make your move as Mr. Vegas comes grooving over the loudspeaker.

This tale may sound like some science-fiction fantasy, but it’s becoming a reality. The increasing popularity of location-based social networks and mobile dating applications, coupled with the emergence of augmented reality and improved camera optics has set the stage for a new dating game, one that is aided by technology to better hone in on potential mates.

This past year saw the growth of location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in via GPS-enabled Smartphones and share their location with friends. In a 10-day span this year, Foursquare claimed it added 100,000 users in a company tweet. During the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, Foursquare reported 347,000 check-ins in one day. The service is growing rapidly, and no matter how banal the updates might look in your Facebook newsfeed, they’re here to stay. Foursquare is partnering with various establishments, like coffee giant Starbucks, to offer special deals and customer rewards via the service, which they hope will entice the thrifty and techno-savvy.

But Foursquare is not the only one trying to become “mayor” of the location-based social networking realm. While Foursquare focuses on going out on the town and encourages consumerism, other services are looking to leverage this new technology for more romantic purposes.

Clifford Lerner, co-founder of AreYouInterested.com, runs an online dating empire that integrates a traditional site with Facebook’s most popular dating application. Last year, his team decided it was time to tie in a mobile application. By February, 100,000 iPhone-wielding flirts had downloaded the application.

The key to the app’s success, according to Lerner, is merging all three platforms so paramours can court each other 24-7.

 “I sign into the Web site at work and message someone, and when I go out at night I see if she wrote back,” he said. “Just imagine that you are out and about and are able to contact the girl you met last week as she gets close by.”

The concept of mobile dating has been around for years, but it has only recently met a turning point as mobile sites become more robust, allowing users to enter in location information to find potential mates nearby. Still, the United States is “a few years behind” Asia, Lerner said. 

“It’s not easy for companies to develop for every device and every platform. You need a lot of resources to maintain them,” he said. “Once the tech side is more streamlined, these things will take off.”

The convergence of dating and technology is not a new phenomenon. Fifteen years ago during the age of dial-up, Match.com went live on the Web, taking the idea of the personal advertisement digital. Since then, numerous dating sites have popped up around the Internet, for every possible demographic. For example, Washington, D.C., has a hipster-dating site called “OK Cupid,” which totally is not encouraging a sense of ironic detachment in your profile description. An anonymous source spoke to us about the experience of using this hipster haven:

“It’s a great way to meet people that you already know you have stuff in common with, rather than having to spend time finding out that you don’t.”

While online dating sites remain a strong source of romantic connections and revenues, the latter half of the last decade saw the emergence of a new strain of technological infused dating: mobile dating applications.           

Using the Match.com iPhone app has been convenient for Greg, a Maryland native who turned to online dating when he moved to mostly-male Silicon Valley.

“When I get messages, it will beep for me. That’s kind of fun when you are out and about. It might be someone you are hot for, or a stranger,” said Greg, who asked to be referred to by his first name.

However, he said he likes to use his computer when composing messages. “I like my spell check and stuff, to seem halfway smart.”

Developers are counting on online dating’s faithful to make the switch to mobile applications. Brendan O’Kane is CEO of messmo, a company that fills technical needs for dating sites. O’Kane, who spoke at the Internet Dating Conference in Miami in January, says immediate gratification is what mobile dating is all about.

“It’s the timeliness, it’s the immediacy. You sent someone a ‘kiss’ and suddenly you have a message from him or her. You can go back and forth on the phone, where previously you might have to wait until that night,” O’Kane said.

“As mobile gets better and better we are going to see a large portion of the population connected and available. It’s going to be immediate. That’s going to be a game changer,” O’Kane said. 

While mobile dating applications are a game-changer in their own right, another technological breakthrough of last year will surely affect the way we court in the digital age: augmented reality. Augmented reality is a live direct view of the real physical world that is augmented by virtual computer generated imagery. For example, the Yelp! iPhone application has a feature called "Monocle," which uses the compass and the camera on the iPhone 3Gs and toggles up nearby restaurants and bar locations.

A Swedish firm, The Astonishing Tribe, has taken this augmented reality technology a step further by incorporating face recognition software with the Smartphone camera that enables users to analyze a stranger’s face and call up their social networking profiles. Based soley on a photo, the application dubbed “Recognizr,” can auto-locate social networking data.  Popular Science reported this new technology:

"Mashing up face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing and augmented reality with the complex digital lives many of us lead on the Internet," PopSci wrote, "TAT has created an app that allows you to gather information on a person and their social networking life simply by pointing your camera phone at their face.”  While this does sound a little creepy, privacy advocates will be pleased to learn that you have to opt into the Recognizr system and upload your photo in order to be found.

Creepy or not, the technology is there and developers, users and established online dating services are beginning to dip their toe into the unchartered waters of GPS-enabled mobile dating applications. The augmented reality application developed by TAT and others adds another layer of complexity to courting in the 21^st century. Imagine knowing nearly everything about a mate before uttering the first “hello.”

Back in Patty Boom Boom, you’re making your move across the floor with Mr. Vegas still blaring in your eardrums.  A group of ladies sashays sexily in a corner.  But only one of them, Tina, likes the circus, progressive rock and Ethiopian food.  You’ve finally met your match.