Yesterday, dating website OKCupid introduced a new smartphone app for the lover-on-the-go, called Crazy Blind Date. The app, available free for both Android and iOS (sorry Blackberry owners, you're literally on your own), is intended to make dating easier by automating the process.
To use it, create a simple profile including your name, age, sexual orientation, a photograph, possible meeting spots, and indicate which upcoming nights you'll be free. After that, the app goes about its yenta-y work and sets you up on the next available date with someone whose criteria closely match yours.
Sound crazy? Well, it's in the name.
OKCupid tried a similar system in a web-only form, back in 2007, but was met with little success. But now, in the smartphone era, Crazy Blind Date may take off because the spontaneity that this system entails is much more likely to work on mobile devices, which are always on and always with us.
Perhaps it could make all of the pre-date arrangements and groundwork more stress-free. Sam Yagan, one of OKCupid's founders, explained it this way to The New York Times:
"If you ask women what they dislike most about online dating, it's that it's too much work. People want instant gratification. It's the trajectory of the industry."
The app promises to be much less labor intensive (not to mention more surprising) for customers than the OKCupid site, because instead of browsing through dozens of profiles and then maybe deciding to proceed, you just meet someone in real life and suddenly there you are - on a date.
That's certainly instant, but as far as being gratifying, that's up to chemistry.
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