Flirt140: “Speed dating” goes online

If you are a person either growing through your teen years or a younger person at heart, you are no doubt hip or “down” as youngsters call it with the whole texting/limit to 160 characters or less scene thanks to again texting and other popular services such as Twitter.  Since the internet took off, online dating has always been advancing in terms of sheer number of dating sites as well as the number of markets and groups that it caters too.  You can literally find a dating site for whatever type of lifestyle you life.  It is actually very diverse.  However a newcomer to “the game” is looking to shake things up a bit and win over those who just don’t like lengthy conversations.  That is where Flirt140 comes in.

Flirt140 is a joint venture between F**ked Company’s Phillip “Pud” Kaplan and Adbrite founder who are adding another Twitter app to their belt of growing applications.  Besides Tweetname and Fast140, a domain name registering site and a twitter speed typing game respectively, Flirt140 looks to jump into the so far untouched world of “online speed dating” in that users are limited to 140 characters to express themselves.

In order to find your lucky verbally scarce significant other, you will have the ability to search through Flirt140 by gender, geographic area, as well as by keyword.  In order to connect to your Twitter account, oAuth is used to ensure security.  To determine gender, Kaplan says that they are using a proprietary algorithm that is “very accurate” in determining if that person behind the account is XX or XY.

One of the cool features of Flirt140 is the ability for users to send direct messages straight to Twitter users even if they aren’t following them.  In this day an age, anything that speeds up a process will more than likely make it big.  With Twitter’s hugely popular success and exploding user base, Kaplan argues that they have a chance to take on and even rival many traditional online dating giants such as Match.com.  Whether Flirt140 can break into the mainstream like Match.com remains to be seen.  One thing is for certain though, Flirt140 is a startup that definitely has a lot of potential to become huge.  What do you think texters/tweeters?  Is a character capped service something that you could get in to?

Source: Tech Crunch

Author: Mike Norris

visit my website

Gadget lover, smartphone collector, and beer connoisseur. I've been writing about gadgets for three years now and loving every minute of it. Outside of the digital landscape, I enjoy being active outdoors. I'm always up for a good conversation, so feel free to drop me a line!