The online dating community has always been a vibrant patchwork of people seeking everything from a life partner down to a one night stand. Innovation in this market is often pursued by tough competition, but a new contender hopes to break away from the pack with location-based dating. Enter meetMoi, a freshly launched site that pairs a mobile app to a powerful social search network. Users create a simple profile and set up criteria for finding a match nearby. Users are then notified of nearby interests through text messages or one can actively browse the surrounding area by simple search terms. The principles behind the service remind me of a popular Japanese gadget, Lovegety, that Wired covered ten years ago. However, unlike Lovegety, meetMoi can be used across any web-enabled mobile device. The site boasts around 500 new users per day and its strength comes in its simplicity. Given the short descriptions provided by users and the casual-encounter dynamics of the site, meetMoi looks to successfully tap into the niche market of spontaneous dating.
A quick search of the surrounding zip code with a simple criteria of users four years younger and older yielded an interesting mix. The first result was a simple statement of goals,“Chilled out artistic and lover of music, out with the superficial, in with true love.” One of the later results was more along the lines of what we expected to find online, “Im the mother of two cant deal with that cant have me.” It’s unfair to judge the service solely by its users but the challenge of a mobile networking service is finding an effective way to match users with compatible selections. Hopefully meetMoi will utilize more specific search terms in the future than simply age, sex and location.
Most notably, the meetMoi service also employs location updating software powered by Xtify. The mobile client synchronizes GPS location data with a central server and relays that information back to the web (better explained by the following image). The real-time location updating feature is currently only available on Android, Symbian (9.2 or higher) or Blackberries (4.1 or higher), but hopefully that will expand with time. Your specific location is always masked, but it enables users to generally see if you are available to casually rendezvous. The real-time updates will likely never make it to the iPhone as Apple is very protective of applications running in the background, but you can always access the features of the site via the web. The real-time updating feature is what meetMoi hopes will seperate them from other dating services and we’ll be interested to see how this technology integrates with modern styles of romance.
