As somebody who flirted around with Tinder for a little while (ha ha), I think this is a pretty good idea. But at the same time, I think I'd prefer to be able to select which Instagram photos I would like to remain hidden, in case they're of a more personal nature. But beyond this, I can't help but feel the entire Tinder experience is slowly deteriorating. The beautiful simplicity of what it used to be is slowly starting to be replaced, which I suppose is to be expected, but disappointing nonetheless. I can't help but feel they'll quickly monetize the amount of swipes you get, so they can quickly squeeze users down to a couple a day.
As sort of a mini experiment, I downloaded some of the other apps out there that are in the same sphere and I've found Hinge to be particularly interesting (assuming you're in a large city). I'm kind of fascinated by all of these relationship apps and I'd love to see data on which are most effective (not for personal gain, mind you).
Very true. If people I know are any indication, when we'd get to a new city (for a wedding, for example), they'd furiously swipe every person that showed up. All that does it water down the entire app and defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Last thing anyone wants to hear is "Oh, I didn't mean to swipe right..".
It's a question I've been interested in about how you can improve response rates and whether you should give people more swipes based on the amount of actual interaction they have with other people, which may indicate they're using it properly.
Want to replace Tinder? I'm not a mobile app guy, but I do big infrastructure and know enough Python to be dangerous.
I'm not saying "How hard can it be?" I know that road to hell. But seriously, storing a couple million photos? Storing profile data? There is literally zero barrier to entry. S3, Elastic Search, EC2, and a bit of ELBs or Haproxy for that HA magic.
Let's call it "Blaze". (Seriously, check my profile for contact info)
You can't patent swiping, and now that Tinder is charging there exists a vacuum in the market for someone who doesn't charge (or monetizes differently).
But literally all you are doing is copying an existing concept. That never works. You need to have something that makes you unique. Slightly more granular privacy controls or faster response times will not do it.
I got a good chuckle. But seriously, copying concepts works as long as you can execute better in some way. Stripe wasn't the first payment processor. Google wasn't the first search provider. Okcupid wasn't the first matchmaking site.
"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."
You're talking about business concepts (a dating site) I'm talking about more fine-grained concepts (swiping between potential dates).
If you cloned Tinder, pixel for pixel, and added a couple of extra controls, your app would fail. Tinder already has a huge userbase and you have a userbase of zero, and the minute benefit provided by your app would be outweighed by having no users on it.
> Tinder already has a huge userbase and you have a userbase of zero, and the minute benefit provided by your app would be outweighed by having no users on it.
You're countering that with the fact that Tinder has enough users that it can afford to introduce pricing to some of them without losing its place in the market?
Look, by all means, clone Tinder and see how it goes. I'll be interested to watch, while also not investing a second of time or effort on such a concept.
> You're countering that with the fact that Tinder has enough users that it can afford to introduce pricing to some of them without losing its place in the market?
I'm countering with the assertion that no one knows if they have enough users that they can afford to introduce pricing.
Suddenly charging for something does not mean its sustainable, no more than users would pay for Twitter or Facebook.
It's not the tech part that's the barrier to entry, it's the social aspect. Figuring out a new way to represent social relationships that attracts users.
I had read a devops job posting for fetlife.com (think kink okcupid/match.com site) a few weeks ago, and you're right! The resources are incredibly minimal to run sites like this, even at scale.
Are there any proximity-based apps that don't require Facebook? I'm interested in trying something like this out, but I don't use Facebook for various reasons.
As sort of a mini experiment, I downloaded some of the other apps out there that are in the same sphere and I've found Hinge to be particularly interesting (assuming you're in a large city). I'm kind of fascinated by all of these relationship apps and I'd love to see data on which are most effective (not for personal gain, mind you).