Mobile dating gives new meaning to "mating call"

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 01/13/06

Link to Original Article

My cell phone kept vibrating urgently with messages.

Blondie19: "Hi what are you doing this morning"

Tommygirl: "U wanna chat with me"

PeachGA: "hello im dan. want 2 chat? where you are"

First of all, did you say your name was Dan?? And second, where you are?

If dating entrepreneurs have their way, the above sentences (well, they're not exactly sentences) will be the sweet nothings of American love in 2006.

Technological dating has finally spun out of control and there is now a movement under way — by both large companies and two-geeks-in-a-basement-start-ups — to turn our cell phones into matchmakers.

I have written that cell phones already have been integrated into dating — we flirt over text and rely on voice mail for all of our basic courtship needs. And mobile dating is already more popular than Internet dating in places like Japan.

But now mobile dating has come to America. So, when it comes to dating, computers have become totally 2004.

All you need to post a profile and picture on Webdate, the mobile dating leader, is a Web-ready camera phone and $3.99 a month. The service is slow, it's cumbersome to type on the phone keypad and the pre-set messages are too cheesy ("Wow! You're smoking hot!").

Then, there's Dodgeball, a service where users make a list of "crushes" based on online pictures. Then, when they go out to the bars, they send "check-in" text messages to Dodgeball to find out if a crush has checked in from another bar nearby. If so, the crush instantly receives a picture and profile of the admirer via cell.

If the crush digs the picture, then the two message each other and meet. And if all works out, the best man at their wedding has a hilarious how-they-met story for his speech.

The mobile dating company Zogo goes a step further and enables users to search through profiles and then speak over the phone through a service that doesn't reveal their numbers.

But just wait. It gets stranger. Dating companies now are incorporating Bluetooth technology, which emits short-range wireless signals between phones. Bluetooth dating is known as "toothing" (for clear reasons), "bluejacking" (for slightly less clear reasons) and "snarfing" (for totally unclear reasons). It enables your phone to detect singles currently in the neighborhood.

One result of this technology is "True Blue Love," the step-child of Cupid and Big Brother. It detects phones of singles nearby and then uses a "love metric" to calculate whether there are any matches.

If there's a match, the phone emits a "raucous mating call" in a way "that harks back to more primitive exchanges."

Partially shocked and maybe a little turned on, I wrote to the developer of True Blue Love and he assured me this wasn't some Big Geek Joke.

Since my cell phone is more than two weeks old and, therefore, obsolete, I don't have Bluetooth and couldn't do the mating call thing. My cell phone also didn't work on Dodgeball and Zogo didn't have any users who lived anywhere near me.

So that's how I ended up trying SMSGenie, a mobile dating program with no pictures and no profiles, just random texts sent to you from random women (and men, like the Dan mentioned earlier). I responded to many of these messages — for "research purposes," as I told my girlfriend — but I didn't get one response.

Still, despite the fact it seems like a quirky, unpopular phenomenon, 6 million Americans are said to be mobile daters. That doesn't seem like a lot — you can find 6 million people in America who are willing to waste money on anything — but it's enough to make the public use of cell phones not only more annoying than it already is but also depressing.

How would it feel to be single as the two people you're sitting between on the bus send mating calls to each other over their cell phones? What would it be like to go to the bathroom during a date only to have your date meet someone better looking on her cell phone while you're gone?

This isn't progress; this is ridiculous. So, here's one warning to dating companies: Don't even think about doing this matchmaking thing to my iPod. I like it just fine the way it is.

Matt Katz is a Gannett New Jersey writer. The Bachelor Pad appears Fridays. E-mail Katz at mkatz@courierpostonline.com.