Mobile match making at its finest
Tinder is a free program for Pwa that makes meeting new people as easy as swiping left or right. Import your Facebook profile, and let the match making begin!
Scan, swipe, match
Unlike conventional dating sites, Tinder relies on snap judgements using a strictly mobile platform. With nothing more than a few images, common interests, or mutual Facebook friends, you’re forced to decide whether you want to give someone a chance, or discard them like yesterday’s paper. People will only get notifications on Tinder if the interest is mutual, making it easy to declare your love without the fear of rejection, at least not immediately.
Tinder’s home screen scans your location for people anywhere from 1 to 100 miles away. Once the list populates, you can swipe through and ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ someone by either swiping right or left, or by cliking the heart or the ‘x’ buttons. The only problem? If you’re swiping through too quickly and accidentally swipe ‘no’ to someone you wanted to swipe ‘yes’ to, there’s no way of getting that match back.
Tapping on someone’s photo lets you scroll through the rest of their images, as well as giving you information about any mutual friends or shared Facebook interests.
If you swipe yes, and the other person does too, you’ll get a notification, and that person will be added to your Tinder matches so that you can message them, if you so desire. The best part, however, is that if you swipe yes, and the other person swipes no, they’ll never know. So swipe away!
Near or far
Getting started with Tinder is really easy. Simply log in with your Facebook account, and the app automatically imports up to 6 of your profile images. You can change which images appear, but only to other photos from your Facebook account, by going to your profile, accessible through the menu located in the top left hand corner of the web app. From here, you can also change Tinder’s settings, including the maximum distance of suggested matches, as well as age range and sexual preference.
The chat icon in the top right hand corner of the screen lets you access your matches and chats. I occasionally experienced delays receiving messages, as well as a skewed interface in some chat windows after the iOS 7 update, but opening and closing the chat usually solves the problem.
Another curiosity was the backlog of people I would get when travelling. I was 4000 miles away, and the app ‘scanned my location’, yet potential Tinder matches from my previous location were still popping up.
Mobile match making heaven
I can’t say much about the quality of people you’ll meet, but Tinder does everything it can to make the process of meeting new people easy. You may not find the love of your life, but the concept of the app is brilliant, and the execution is excellent: finding real people, close by, that want to meet, without the fear of blatant rejection. And, unless someone’s gone to the trouble of making a fake Facebook profile, you can be sure that the person you ‘like’ is who they say they are. Let the swiping begin!
