Just while Apple and Google are trying reassure their users that they are not in tracking them, online dating companies are hoping to use it to their advantage. Meetic SA, the owner of Match.com’s European arm is joining with startups like MeetMoi LLC in order to provide location-based dating.
This year, Meetic will release features that allow users to find out in real-time who is near them and could be interesting in meeting. This means that people who share interests that are related to places can meet up and possibly meet their soul mates in parks, gyms or theatres, for example.
It is the next logical step for dating sites or apps to use location data to their advantage and more users than ever before are using their mobile devices for dating.
At the same time, this explosion in mobile dating comes when governments in Germany, France and Italy are looking into whether Apple’s iPhone and iPad violate privacy rules. Apple has said that they aren’t tracking locations and plan to cut the levels of data that the iPhone stores.
Location-based dating is a great way for people to flirt and Meetic is planning on taking advantage of that. It follows that long-term and love relationships will probably stay online, as it is easier to exchange more information that way. Mobile services will be based more on having fun and meeting like minded people and will increase the chances of dating sites to boost their conversion rate – the rate at which users go from free to paid services.
The one issue that comes with location-based dating though – is safety. Very recently, a woman from Los Angeles sued Match.com because she claims she was sexually assaulted by a date she met through the website. This incident and other ones like it will lead dating sites to have to go through stringent background checks, which may slow down the process and add to costs. But the point is – checks like this are necessary.
Over a longer period of time, we will probably see mobile dating and dating apps becoming hubs for the virtual currency we see on Facebook and websites like Second Life. Zynga’s FarmVille is a great example of this too and it is easy enough to imagine users sending each other virtual roses, grown virtually.
And even though dating sites may move to mobile devices as a way to expand their offering, this doesn’t mean that mobile dating could eventually overtake the traditional web-based dating. As phones are becoming more powerful and can do more things – they can achieve more than we ever thought.