While I myself am not into the whole gay/bi-sexual scene, I’m sure many readers out there are. With more social dating sites and social network sites making iPhone apps, mainly tuned for heterosexual relationships, the gay community may feel shunned or left out. Grindr hopes to fix this. Joel Simkhai, the man behind Grindr has released a location based application for iPhones that you can use to chat and maybe even eventually hook up with the lucky guy of your choice. Finally the gay community has some techie social networking love. The rest is just inside…
Of course, in being openly gay, you always run the rist of hate crimes and violence becasue some poeple are too closed minded to grasp simple things. Because of this, Grindr by default obscures users’ locations. Of course, you can turn this feature on as to make it easier to find people in your area. With the location feature on, you can find people anywhere from a few feet away to many many miles away.
Upon starting the app, you will see a grid of photos of strangers around you in the surrounding area. Clicking on any individual photo will bring you to that user’s profile allowing you to read up on that person and help you decide if you want to take the plunge and have a face to face meet. To further help you in your decision, from the user’s profile, you can also engage in a live chat to get to know the person better. After the chat if both users decide they want to meet they can now share their location if they so choose. While Grindr isn’t the only app for gay men, another gay dating app, The Gay Community App (iTunes Link), hasn’t had very good success so far apparently because of bugs and other quirks. However a recent update was supposed to fix that so we may see Grindr and The Gay Community App dualing it out.
Grindr is a step in a new direction for the gay community that should make finding the perfect mate much easier, confidential, and dare I say fun? If you’re in the market with an iPhone check out Grindr (iTunes Link) today.
Source: Tech Crunch
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