Tinder. I had never heard of it until the Monday before the semester started. My sister, who is a senior as Boston College, first described it to me as a “creepy dating site.” The app spread like wildfire, no pun intended, throughout the Bentley campus.. I was intrigued but didn’t think anything of the app until I discovered that both my guy and girlfriends were hooked. I decided to check it out and the first thing that came to mind was the hacking scene in The Social Network when Zuckerberg creates Facemash, his version of “Hot or Not.”
Tinder is along the same lines, but a friendlier version of Facemash where you see four Facebook profiles of people less than a 50 miles radius away from your current location. The app creates a personalized virtual list of people for you to view; the order is determined by the person’s relevance to you based off of interests, shared friends, and networks. The more you use Tinder, the further the app develops and personalizes your list based off of tastes and preferences chosen. If you “like” a person and there is a mutual “like” between two people, you are able to message that person with the intention of meeting someday.
To me, personally, it seems like a great way to procrastinate and have fun with friends. When I checked out the app, I recognized the first couple of people I viewed and knew them from Bentley, but we had never officially met or had conversation prior to using the app. This led to the dilemma: Do I “like” them? What happens if I “like” them and they “like” back? Me being the over-thinker was then stressed and decided it was probably best to delete the app. Ehh, I can do without it. It seems all a little too new age for my liking; simply judging people at first glance by physical appearance.
So far, it has been a week since I heard about Tinder, and the buzz seems to already be dying down on the university level. We’re in college, and don’t need an app to meet new people and there are plenty of opportunities to socialize in person. What I’m really worried about is that Tinder will trickle down and hit secondary school students where it will really take off. Tinder takes the pressure out of “dating” and is a socially accepted form of Match.com. It seems much more risky than MySpace or Facebook, because it promotes people to physically meet strangers in person. I can see a future 20/20 episode airing about people going undercover on Tinder and it will soon make the black list for social media apps. Let’s see if Tinder catches fire or sizzles away.