What In the World Is Mobile Dating?
What In the World Is Mobile Dating?
In this day and age, everyone is of course familiar with the concept and the process of internet dating. Participants first of all choose a site, and register their name and email account. Once their account is up and running, they log in and create a profile. The profile contains information about their physical characteristics, their likes and dislikes, and what they are seeking in a dating partner. Profiles usually also include a photo of the person; those that do not are generally effective in attracting the attention of other people on the site.
Once a member of a dating site has a profile, they then browse the profiles of other members. If they find one they like, they send that member a message. That member can look at the first person’s profile and decide if they want to take things further, whether by talking further via email or phone, or by going on a date.
So far, so easy. This kind of dating-by-computer has been around for a long time now. When it was a new concept, it was greeted with a sense of mild repulsion or embarrassment by most people. While dating sites have always been popular, it’s only fairly recently that using them has lost its social stigma.
So if ‘normal’ internet dating is effectively dating-by-computer, mobile dating is dating-by-mobile device, where the device could be a cell phone, PDA, or other portable device with internet connectivity.
In mobile dating, participants upload a profile, as for a normal internet dating site but significantly shorter. It will include age, gender and sexual preference at a minimum, but some services allow for more details. A picture is of course also a must, but that’s easy when the device you’re using the access the service already has a camera built-in. They can then search for other profiles through their device.
Unlike internet dating, mobile dating tends to focus on people who are already in reasonable proximity to the user. So rather than searching through thousands of profiles of everyone who is subscribed to a service, the search is narrowed to users who are already in the same area as you. It’s a more immediate thing than the way internet dating has traditionally worked.
Some systems use Bluetooth to send out a signal with a certain radius, say 30 feet, to other users, for example in a bar or a club. This kind of ‘proximity alert’ dating is thought by many experts to be the ‘next big thing’ in the world of dating technology.
Principal analyst at Juniper Research, Windsor Holden, says that mobile dating is expected to see big rises in the numbers of users in the next few years, to 260 million by 2012. “It’s a case of enabling the functionalities you’re used to in the fixed environment: the ability to search databases and match up with people out there,” he said.
As for the profit model, some mobile dating services will charge for access, while others will allow free access but charge extra for additional services.
