June 9, 2014
It was high time that tinder broke the mould and gave the app an update. However, I am not sure this is what people had in mind. The use of online dating sites and apps for meeting new people has become increasingly popular. The stigma that was attached to meeting people for romantic purposes online has been lifted and everyone from the affluent middle-class, hectic-scheduled businessman to the leftfield social outcast now uses the internet as a medium for finding ‘love’. Given the success of the Tinder app, hitting 1 Billion matches last March and well on their way to 2 Billion, the need to expand features and add value to the app is upon them.
Cue the release of ‘moments’ – Tinder’s new photo sharing feature. Moments allows users to take a picture and share it with all of your matches. Your matches can then ‘like’ or ‘nope’ your image in much the same way that you pick your matches. Furthermore, the images can be doodled on before sending and they only last 24 hours before they fade, like a memory does and so you ‘can be yourself without the pressure of making it perfect’, Tinder claim. I am not sure that I understand the value of this feature, as I would imagine that most people reach a level of communication or relationship status with their matches and then switch platform to Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, love letters, 2 tin cans with a bit of string attaching them, anything other than Tinder.
Personally, I think that there are far more relevant and imaginative feature updates that Tinder could have implemented at this stage, some examples would be:
– Dark mode to make yourself invisible without closing your account (although apparently this is in development at the moment)
– Choose location so that you do not have to search from a radius of where you currently are. In many ways this breeds the type of mentality that Tinder are trying to eradicate. The option to search within the radius of an area you can pre-select would be a very beneficial feature. For example; you are away on business and looking for love, you want to talk to people close to where you are from and not people in a 5km radius of the 3* hotel in Krakow.
In conclusion, I think Tinder are trying to send a clear message that they are getting more ‘social’ – they want people to use their platform to communicate and not just as a fishing pool to meet other people and then channel hop onto their preferred network.