There are a lot of dating application and website choices out there, but lets face it, some of them are kind of creepy. I’m not dating, but I have a lot of friends and loved ones that are and I watch the agonizing process on the sidelines.
Can these apps track your location? Which profiles are real? Is the person a total whack job psycho killer? Will we have anything in common? Will we have to email one another for weeks to settle on a place to finally meet? Will they stand me up? Are they trolls?
Well, a team of SuicideGirls founders and an early employee (Sean Suhl, Steve Simitzis and Courtney Riot) decided to team up to solve these particular problems. While there won’t be any naked girls and this has nothing to do with SuicideGirls.com (I know, shucks), they are taking a lot of what they learned from operating SuicideGirls for the past 10+ years and applying it to a brand new community and company focused on dating.
The founders told me that SuicideGirls continues to grow and is doing quite well under the helm of their other founder Missy Suicide.
You can download Let’s Date from the app store (right now, you can only date and find people in the San Francisco area – they plan to expand to other regions soon) and create your account using Facebook Connect. Here’s the catch though, you must have 50 friends in order to join. Once you join, their service analyzes your interests on Facebook to help populate what they call a “dating card”. You fill out some entertaining questions about yourself, put up a favorite quote or two and then this is something I find interesting. You can hide your card from your friends on Facebook. That’s smart. You might want to branch out of your social sphere and meet new people. You also might not want your friends to know you are dating or intimate details about you and your dating preferences.
From Sean Suhl: “Let’s Date is our reaction to the last generation of successful online dating communities. We wanted to eliminate laborious surveys and questionnaires, fruitless repetitive messaging and endless search criteria and useless result lists. It was important for us to create something that requires less commitment, less effort and more results. You just casually browse people’s cards and let us know your reaction and our system learns how to deliver better cards to you.”
I really love the design and I think design junkies will agree. Which makes sense, the three founders are design freaks. When you scroll through the cards, you can select “let’s date” or “no thanks”. When you choose the second option, you are prompted to draw lines through the parts of the dating card that you disagree with. The person’s appearance, maybe they like Ron Paul, are too deeply romantic, their bands trouble you or you don’t like their idea of a good time. Let’s Date takes that data, learns from it and then presents you with new cards to look at that might be a better match.
If you decide to date that person, you can suggest a location, who pays (you, they do, or dutch) and a time. If they like the place and like you, they can accept the date or propose other options until you agree. Once a place and time and payment details are agreed upon, you can chat with that person in real time.
Like I said, I’m not dating, but I was pretty pleased with the dating cards their app returned to me. I left my profile up, so if you happen to get matched up with me, go ahead and use my account for practice. You can also draw lines through my face. I don’t mind and I promise not to cry.
