Geo-Dating: OKCupid Adds Location to Mobile App | Hacker News Reader

Geo-Dating: OKCupid Adds Location to Mobile App

mashable.com

30 pointstathagatadg17 comments

I wonder if this will steer the mobile users into a more casual hookup niche, a la' Grindr (a gay hookup app), or if there's a market for normal dates that happen spontaneously based on location, without the stigma of implied sex.

Maybe, but from my research it appears that the version of the OKC mobile app released a couple of weeks ago is losing them quite a few installs. It was truly a user-hostile release, so any gains they might get from added functionality may be more than offset by the app's sheer unusability.

What was hostile about it? I didn't notice any difference.

I had been using my iPhone 3G the last two weeks until I had some time to fix my 3GS. The app was terribly slow and sometimes even unresponsive on the 3G, to the point where I found myself using the web app more often than not. Now I am back to using my 3GS and the performance is better on the iPhone app, but I still find myself using the web one more. I like the interface better and it is also what opens when I click to read the rest of the notifications in my email.

As for the location feature, a couple of weeks ago I was put in beta trial for it so I have had some time to look it over and am not too impressed. It is indecent idea, but I would prefer to have conversation and feel the girls out a bit before just meeting up. Also, the girls that have been using the new local feature haven't really been my type and maybe this goes hand in hand with the previous statement.

Well for one thing, every single click on any link or feature involved some huge, slow round-trip from their server, seemingly revealing it to be just a web UI front end accessing some god-awful API. I'm talking about a 5sec+ spinner on every click. It is absolutely unusable, and I uninstalled it the day after I noticed all of this. Before this I was using their Android app all the time. In the intervening days I have disabled my account as well.

There's a market for speed dating, and some people think that speed dates are too fast, so spontaneous location-based dates probably have some market. I'm not sure how big it is, though.

It's nice that they're recognizing that sometimes people want to search in a radius that is less than 25 miles (current minimum on the full site). I find it pretty annoying that I have to manually filter out women from South Bay and/or Berkeley when I'm really just looking for women living in the city.

I've had some good results by messing with the query string. But only for particular values--last I tried, 5 was often a good number. Dunno if it'd catch people in Berkeley, though.

Ever since OKC was bought by Match, I'm seeing a deterioration in the site; and I'm leery of giving any more information to Match. I detest Match, they're a slimy bunch.

One of the more aggravating--and possibly predictable--problems with the acquisition has been a huge influx of boring people.

I see great opportunities for the broadcasts idea, especially the part where I can attach a picture that really lets prospective mates know what activities I am interested in.

How does one try out this beta app?

I have OkCupid App on my iPhone and it automatically updated itself to this beta version.

Weird. I see version v2.0.3, and the app store says that too. I tried rebooting the phone and using local wifi.

G+'s manageable exposure model may threaten the whole online dating arena when opt-in interest groups (Facebook 'page' replacements, possibly co-branded with Google Groups) with geolocation support and event functionality (possibly co-branded with Google Calendar) happen. Discuss.

These features are only useful for attractive people that other attractive people want to hang out with.

How does that differ from online dating as a whole?

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