Love: There's An App For That

taken a nice long hiatus, I have that. It's a pleasure to be here today. Yeah, fantastic, And so I asked Allison what she would like to talk about. When she agreed that, you know, she jump on and be a guest. I give my guests the opportunity to pick if they want to. And you jokingly suggested an app called Cuddler, And while that was a joke, it led to the actual choice of this episode, which goes beyond Cuddler.

But we will talk about that right, right, right, We were talking about it in the break room and the fascination that was Cuddler. Yeah, yeah, there's kind of a horrid fascination for a lot of us here and how stuff works. Who have very specific parameters, uh, within which we welcome that kind of personal interaction, and when it's outside those parameters, we get a little wigged out by it,

but we'll get there. So we decided we wanted to talk about how the Internet has become an incredible tool for people to first meet each other in the online space or the digital space, and then event eventually transition that into meeting in real life. And a lot of what we're going to talk about today is focused on dating, but that's not exclusively what we're going to talk about.

But it turns out that's a that's a big part and has been a big part of the Internet since the Internet became a thing that most of us got access to. Yes, do you have any kind of early memories of some emails you sent, maybe to a lady you were interested in, or well, there's a there's a lady that I was very much interested in, a lady who I'm still very much interested in because she's my wife. I met her in a chat room online, Yeah, a tell net chat room, so not even a web based one.

In fact, when I met my wife, the web was new to me, Like I had not even used a browser. Uh. I had seen other people on a browser, and I thought, well, that looks really interesting. But I was jumping into chat rooms just chatting about anything really and she and I hit it off, and we ended up, uh, corresponding quite a bit, and then we met in person, and then we started dating, and then she moved to Georgia, and

then we got engaged, and then we got married. And seventeen years later, here we are so early story of using the Internet to do exactly what we're talking about. So I have personal experience here, but you know, we've seen the people use the Internet for all sorts of things along those lines. And here's an interesting statistic I found.

According to the American National Academy of Sciences, which did a survey back in two thousand thirteen, more than thirty three of all people who got married in the United States between two thousand five and two thousand twelve met their spouse online. Yeah. That's a large swath of people. Yeah, more than a third of all of all married couples first met online, well married couples from two thousand five to two thousand and twelve. And that's incredible to me.

I mean, I remember when I started dating my wife, that was considered unusual. Yeah, we all have friends who've met online, and I was kind of a novelty back in the day. I remember thinking, you know, one of my very dear friends met her husband on match dot com, and I was a little wary, like, but it's it's pretty it's pretty normal now normal if I when when more than a third, you know, it's quickly becoming as normal as other method of meeting people and getting to

know someone and dating them. And uh, yeah, for me, it was it was outside the norm both because one the Internet was so new, and too that I was getting a date, so it was multiple outside the norms. But uh, I read a CNN article which was not entirely helpful because they reported that a survey which was unnamed in the article, so that by two thousand nine of all same sex couples reported meeting online first, and about half of all married couples who met online did

so through dating sites. So in order for us to really talk about it, we're gonna be looking a lot at dating sites early on in this episode and what

they do and how they do it. So across platforms, about eleven percent of Internet users have said they've used an online dating site, and across cell phone users, about seven percent have used a dating app on their phones, and it seems like it's going more in that direction, although if you look at it from a stock market type perspective, it's still the online dating sites that are kicking, but in terms of market share and actually making revenue,

and that that comes from a two thousand thirteen report from the Pew Research Internet Project. And what's also interesting is that it just continues to get more segmented, right, so you have you know, Jonathan, maybe you and I were first interested in this, but now it's our parents, and now it's more niche markets to oh sure, yeah, So we're seeing lots of of services and sites pop

up that are catering to very specific demographics. Right, So you might see one that's catering specifically to uh, to the baby boomer boomer generation, or some that are obviously based just on the experience, geared towards folks who are more in the college age range or uh. You know,

there are a ton of different variations on this. So there, of course some sites that try to be all things to all people, and then we're seeing a lot more of these that are kind of tailor made for specific demographics. It was funny. I was talking to a coworker who just signed up her mom last night for I think it was called Our World or My World. Her sixty three year old mom was like, Hey, can you help me get on some of these dating sites? And she said, okay, Mom, Yeah.

I mean again, that might sound unusual to us, in particular not to put a number to our ages, but Alison and I both can remember a time when the Internet wasn't really a thing that we access um, So it's certainly something that's still there's still elements of it that are kind of unusual to us, but it's becoming increasingly normal to the younger generations because they grew up with this, And you know, why not have this be a tool to to meet people and to try and

match yourself up with people who are sharing the same sort of interest that you do and thus potentially find someone with whom you're going to be really compatible with. You mentioned before that this is a big industry. You know, you talked about a lot of how how many people on the Internet had used a site, and you mentioned that you know, there's there's real money to be made here. But let's get to some real figures, right, So there

is some serious money to be made here. I was reading a report from IBIS World looks like some sort of industry research type of report at two thousand fourteen, and the authors were estimating that it's about a two billion dollar market dating services in the US. So that's the broader context. And within that, of course, online is going to be you know, a slice of that, and that slice is about so one point four billion is what we're talking about now, and I can only see

that growing. Yeah, yeah, I agree, And we're seeing it grow in interesting ways too. Whereas the desktop online dating sites are still very much a thing, we're seeing an explosion of this kind of stuff in the mobile space, both mobile apps that are tied into an existing online dating site and those that are its own experience ends.

And we'll talk about some of those two. And uh, it's not it's not just that's big business, but for the consumer, as in the person who's looking for a date, it turns out to make sense financially too, right, So this is pretty interesting. Um I. And another report um from the Topeka Capital Markets that was again like two thousand,

fourteen or so. Um, they found that it was cheaper. Right, So you're paying for your subscription to your online site, but what you're looking at, according to this report, is about a twenty three dollar tab before you finally wind up making a match of your dreams. Yeah, so these guys are saying that if you pay your subscription of you know, maybe two d or some dollars, you're gonna wind up with cost savings, like in a thousands of dollars.

So so online dating makes sense to your wallet, Yeah, because it means that what what it means is that while you're in pursuit of finding this person who's going to compatible with you, you can do a lot of that early work online as opposed to meeting people in places, going out to take people out to to, you know, whatever, a dinner or a movie or whatever, even if everyone's paying for their own thing. Obviously, all of that stuff starts to mount up, and not every date turns out

to be a success. Sometimes you realize, oh, you know, this person is really nice, but we're not really clicking things. Yeah, there's no spark there, and so yeah, I could I could definitely see this. I am personally very thankful for the money that the Internet has saved me in that sense. So looking more closely at what's going on with these dating sites, like how they work, you actually have to

go all the way back to nineteen sixty five. Now, clearly I'm not talking about an Internet dating service that far back, because that's pre Internet. We're talking arpennet days back then. But ninety five was before the era of the personal computer. We didn't even have PCs yet. But a Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tar was working on this idea.

He had come up with a notion. He noticed that a lot of other Harvard undergraduate graduates were talking about finding it difficult to find a date, like it's just hard to go out and meet people that were compatible. And he thought, hmm, there are these computer things that crunched numbers really well. And he was he was a math major, uh, and he he got to work with computers,

but he didn't really understand programming. At this point, they said, you know, there are these computers that are really good at number crunching. If we were to reduce the personality, uh preferences of people to numbers, then a computer could theoretically start matching people who have the most similar responses

to a survey. So that's why he did. He developed a survey, gave it to tons of his classmates, and he essentially relied on the second person to create a computer program that would match up these were ponses, and he rented time on one of the enormous computers at Harvard. I think it was like a hundred dollars a day or something in order for him to rent the time on this machine. It might have even been higher than that,

but it was a wild success. People loved the idea of being able to use a machine to take out the guesswork of trying to find that perfect person. In fact, there was one report of a young lady who was matched up with her ex boyfriend and got back with him because the computer told her to. So that we started to act like the computer was like the oracle

and that we must obey the machine. Uh. But you know again, it kind of showed a couple of different things that showed how people really wanted to find someone who was compatible. And it also showed that there was this reverence for computers because they were objects a myth and legend to most people back in the sixties, they didn't have the experience with computers that we do today. Once you've gone through a few blue screens of death,

you realize they're not infallible machines. But at any rate, if you flash forward to the nineteen nineties, by then you had had some computer dating services uh competing in the United States. But now we see the rise of

the Internet, especially with the World Wide Web. The Internet had been around, but the World Wide Web was what made it accessible, and uh so you've got those earliest days of regular folks getting access to it, and the connectivity opened up the opportunity for meeting new people that you might never have ever encountered in your life otherwise. So we've got an article actually on how Stuffworks dot Com about how online dating works. So it'll cover all

the basics. But if anyone has ever done any browsing on an online dating site, you know typically what they're about. It's usually you you create a profile, probably include a picture. Absolutely, you probably include the best pictures you possibly can to present yourself in the best light possible professional head shot. Then you are going to fill out a profile that includes a lot of your preferences, things that you enjoy things that you're you're not into. It might be things,

yeah I'm a non smoker, that kind of stuff. Political affiliation, it could be is, and it really depends upon the site. Like some sites, that's true. Also, are you are you into pets? Do you like pets? Do you like kids, you're not like kids? Do you want to have kids?

Do you already have kids? These are all the sorts of questions that you would put it there, and then when you go for a search, then you can say which parameters you consider to be the most important, like say, uh, they need their age needs to fall within this range, or I'm not going to have anything in common with this person, or height is a big one. Height is a big one. I read that b m I in

regards to men looking for women was a big factor. Yeah, yeah, I think it was around like eighteen point five percent. Was one figure sided like they like women with that sort of b m I, which is ridiculous. Well, now there's a whole other discussion we could have about expectations

and realism. But at any rate, one of the interesting things I found was that we don't necessarily know what it is we're looking for when we're looking for it nor or we may we may have a suspicion, but we may not be honest about it when we're doing our search. For example, let's say that I put in there that I really want to meet someone who's really interested in reading, but it turns out that there are

other factors that I think are way more important. But I'm trying to present myself as someone who is an intellectual and therefore value this. Some online dating sites can figure out when you're fibbing, because it's your behavior that

tells the site what you're really into. Because if I start going through profiles and I'm spending less than a couple of seconds on them, and I'm zooming through them really quickly, the the online dating stars can log all that and say, all right, well, we gave him the matches based upon what he said he wanted, but he totally breathed through them all so except this one. He spent a couple of months looking at this one. So really he's looking more for what this person represents rather

than what he says he represents. And as more and more data gets accumulated, the more people who use the site, the dating site algorithms adjust themselves and start showing you what you really want, even if you're not aware that that's what you want to you. Yeah, which is kind of weird. I mean, we've talked on tech stuff many times about how it only takes a little data to give a system a great idea of who you are as a person, but it even is true in the

dating world. There's also approach called collaborative filter filtering. This is where a system will organize people into large groups just based on preferences which might not even be obvious from the outside. So, all right, so let's say we've we've at a population of like ten thousand people and

they've all created profiles. The algorithm will start to find commonalities between those people that again, if you were just to look at the profiles as a human being, you might not even be able to pick out which things

they have in common. But because we're talking about sites that have access to such huge amounts of data and can run all these different types of comparisons against one another, it makes perfect sense to the algorithm, which is kind of creepy in a way when you think about it, because it ultimately starts to divide people into large groups and it suggests that there are a limited number of groups that people fall into. In other words, it's kind

of like thinking about horoscopes. I don't like the idea of a horoscope because it suggests that there are only twelve types of people in the world, right, I mean, if you if you leap to that, if you say, my horoscope for today is, etcetera, that means that roughly one twelfth of the world's population is going to have the same sort of day I'm going to have, which

doesn't make sense. But these systems actually show that that's not that far off from the truth in the sense that there a limited number of categories that you can actually shove people into, and from at least a mathematic perspective, it makes sense. It works. Yeah, so little creepy um, But it turns out like that's not it's not always just about the data, the personal data about yourself, right right.

So one really interesting thing that I found, um was I happened to stumble upon a gentleman by the name of Dan Arielli. I believe that's how you say his last name. And he's over a duke, and he's a professor of psychology and behavioral economics. By the way, behavioral economics is so fascinating. So um Dan gave an interview to the big thing, and what he was saying was right, it's not all about the personal data. It's not about the boxes you check or you know, your particular preferences.

And what he was postulating after he kind of browsed online dating sites and found them significantly lacking, was that it's more about your interaction with the person. That you can tell a lot more about an interaction with a person than by simply like knowing that you're eyes are blue and you like cats and whatever it is about you. Right, It's kind of like the difference between a resume and a job interview. Absolutely, And so his idea is, let's get away from the check boxes and let's set up

ways for people to interact. And so he set up this website and it was basically you can pick an avatar and just really simple. It wasn't like one of these crazy avatars. It was maybe a triangle and a square,

there's some color in there. And then he basically put like movies and images and words, and you kind of move around and navigate and you talk to other avatars as you encounter them, and so how all these encounters went, which is set up like a better interaction for people to meet each other and get to know each other

and have a successful date ultimately. Well, that's really cool that the channel of that is that it kind of requires a synchronous approach, meaning that both parties need to be active at the same time, whereas we're seeing a lot of communication online is asynchronous, right, the idea that I can send you a message, Allison, and then you respond to it when you have the availability when you may not even notice that you have a message until an hour later, and you respond and I might not

notice till three hours later. But we can continue to have this communication, which is effective in many ways, but it because, yeah, it's disjointed. It's it's you don't have a continuous experience. It takes away a lot of that spontaneity that you would have in a conversation with an actual person in real time. So it's not that there's no value in that type of communication. There certainly is.

And uh, and I love using all the tools that have this asynchronous communication aspect to them, but uh, you know, this approach, while it might be more effective than say,

just a a collection of profiles. It demands that you have this you know, real time interaction with somebody, which limits the number of people that you can presumably encounter because it all depends on when both parties are available to interact, right, So if you're available to interact at the same time, I'm thinking that a synchronous interaction, I mean, it just seems like it would be more effective, right because you're talking to somebody who's in the same frame

of minded view. Sure, yeah, I mean, and there are a lot of dating sites that have a message system where you know, either it's like an instant message type thing or something along those lines, where you can set that sort of thing up if both parties are online, but they don't, they don't depend upon that, right. That's that's an added benefit to those sites. You could totally have and asynchronous conversation with someone in a series of messages,

you know, back and forth between each other. But I do think that ari elli is onto something. I think Arie Ellie is right and that these kind of interactions tend to have more value to them than the asynchronous type. So he had a funny stat and what he was suggesting with that online dating right is ineffective and inefficient. And so one of the things that he said was that about six hours of chat for one lousy coffee date. I mean that's a lot of time invested. There's a

lot of time invested. Yeah, I mean it's And that's the thing is that you can't expect every single interaction to go well. In fact, we'll be talking about expectations a lot in this episode. Uh, you know, the people are people, and you may think going into something that you're going to have this incredible interaction, which might just be unrealistic expectations. Um, And that's just a human problem that's been around forever. I mean that has nothing to

do necessarily with the Internet. It's or or these dating apps and sites. The dating sites often create kind of a problem with this because they're built upon the promise that their service will help you find someone special. So it behooves them to kind of foster this image that you are going to meet Mr or Mrs Wright just by following, you know, us, creating a profile and seeking them out this way. But human interaction is far more complicated than that. That, however, is not the right way

to sell memberships to your dating site. Hey, it's complicated and you may or may not like this person. Come join our site for twenty bucks a month, but at any rate. Um. You know, we also have the interesting research that goes into, uh, how the dating sites create

these algorithms that match people up. Um. There have been some folks who have looked into it from a personal perspective, people who happened to work in statistics and mathematics and computer science, who who were looking for a date and wondering, well, what's the most effective way for me to use this tool? Engineers tend to think in that way, like you gave me a tool, and I can use it this way,

but is there a better way to use it? So, people like Chris McKinley and Amy Webb have experimented with various online dating sites to find out what was working behind the scenes, How were these matches made the most successful profiles, What what was it about those profiles that made them successful? And so they really looked deeply into these things to figure out how they work, so that not that they could game the system, but so that they could make the most effective profile to find the

people they're interested in meeting. Okay, so when we're talking about an effective profile, do we mean like somebody who's been successful at finding one relationship that the person is stuck with or just having a lot of dates. I think it was more about the number of responses. They wanted to find a profile that got the most responses from the people that seemed to be the target audience, the people that the folks that the the individuals themselves

were interested in dating. And so Amy Web actually has a fantastic ted talk where she goes through this whole process and talked about how she identified the language that was being used in very successful profiles. She had created several fake profiles and populated them with different approaches to kind of see which ones were the most effective, you know what, what sort of UH profiles would get the

most responses. And the the results were dramatic. And some people might say, well, as that totally ethical, I mean, you've got actual people who are looking for a date and they're pursuing a date with a fake persona. But at any rate, she said, well, I was doing research, you know, I needed to find out how this worked. And once I knew that, I could tweak my own profile, and sure enough she met a guy they ended up dating,

and then they ended up getting married. So she was doing it both because she is interested in the system and also because she genuinely was trying to find someone to to go out on dates with. So it to me what was interesting is that there are now two

different types of algorithms out there. There's the algorithm that's being used by the dating site to figure out how to match people up, and then there are the algorithms that people have come up with to figure out how to make their profile the most attractive in order to get the most potential dates, therefore having the most potential chances of finding that someone special. I'd be curious to

hear what she found out was effective. I mean, I think that we've all kind of had the experience of maybe your friend is going to go on an online dating service, and I certainly, as an editor and lover of words in general, have helped friends craft profiles. And

it's comical. I mean it is comical. So whatever the your flaw is, say you're a big old procrastinator, Well, I'm laid back, you know, I'll like to take my time and enjoy life, right right, So all the code were it's in the little editing that you do to just tweak it enough. Yeah, it's it's again. It's a lot like building a resume, which is both a good and a bad thing, right because a resume is all about putting your best professional face forwards that you get

the best opportunity to get a job interview. This is putting your best personal face forward to get that opportunity for a date. Uh yeah, it's and it's serious business. I mean, this is this is these are people's lives and not to mention, an entire one point four billion dollar industry. So it's a big deal. So how do these websites actually make money? Right? So, we talked about the subscription service model, right, so you pay some feed monthly and or maybe you get I mean, okay, Cupid

for example, does not it's all free. But then match I believe an e Harmony and some of those uh you know, to get messages and things like that, you have to pay a subscription and then their ads of course, sure, yeah, adds support is one of the big ways that any

web presence makes money. Right. So, but it's not clear how some of these apps are making money, and I think that they aren't I mean, yeah, no, that's a lot of apps don't make money because what the app developers trying to do is create a tool that becomes so popular that some other company buys out the person

who developed it, right, I mean, that's the approaches. Let's let's make a tool that everyone loves so much that a company is going to swoop in here, pay me a huge amount of money because of the value that the potential or the potential value of that app, because of all the people who are using it. You know, keep in mind, whenever we're talking about a service or an app like this kind of thing, ultimately the product

is us, the people using that service or app. Where the product where the We're the thing that is making the money, making money for whatever company owns it. So if you are like a tender and you have no jones, actually there you go. So if you if you had created that app and uh, you didn't have a way of monetizing it directly, it may just be that you're doing it because it's a really useful thing. People are really into it. People are a lot of people are

are downloading it and active on it. Someone is going to find that valuable and they're going to purchase you. A lot of them also just exist on venture capitalist investment for the short term, which is that's risky because that's an investment. People expect to have a return on that investment, So you have to eventually figure out a way to make some money or you're just gonna you know,

you've slid your reputation. If you are known as someone who makes tools that ultimately never pay out, then you're not going to get any financial backing for your future work. So uh, I think that's the main way that these apps are making money is they're getting bought, which that's a risky move. But if you can make a really good app, then that's something that you know, it's it's something you can count on at least as a potential opportunity down the road. It was reading the guy who

just created Cuddler, Charlie. Yeah, that old Charlie had no idea. He was just planning for a soft launch of Cuddler. I forget Charlie's last name, sorry Charlie, Yeah, sorry Charlie. Anyway, he was just he was unprepared for the sheer amount

of attention that Cudler received. Yeah. Yeah, it got covered by a couple of different UH news outlets like Huffington Post and Slate I think wrote about it and uh, and that attention meant that there was an explosion in downloads and suddenly this app that Charlie probably felt was not totally ready yet was being adopted by tons of people. And and normally if you're launching, yeah, yeah, it was supposed to be a soft launch where he could do

some testing, get feedback, tweak stuff. But now it goes when you get that large adoption, it goes from testing phase to now it's a product, and that is a problem. Now we should probably mention what Cuddler is. In fact, this is a great way of transitioning into just mobile apps in general. So Cuddler, which was of course the app that that Allison brought to my attention. I did not know about this app until you mentioned it to me. I had not heard about it. Yeah, my head was

under a rock apparently when this came out. So Cuddler is pretty much what sounds like. It's an app that is designed to allow someone who wants to just cuddle with somebody else, you know, just find somebody to to cuddle with, you know. That's it. Just some personal contact um. Right, So it's geolocation base. So you're finally you're finding people

who are in need of a cuddle nearby you. And it's pretty simple set up actually, if in case you guys haven't experimented with it, and I know a lot of people have, um, but the basic premises, Yeah, you say that you're up for a cuddle, you find people in your area who are up for it. Once you get a match, both of your locations are shown, and then you meet. I think you're allowed to send one message, yeah,

indicating the cuttle time and place. Right. Yeah, this is the location thing is definitely an issue, I think because it's a The way I've read it described is that it shows a map and it plots the location of the two parties on the map. Right, So if we were looking for a cuddle, I could see you heading across the park towards me, and you could see me heading for that park bench that we decided we were going to cuttle on. Right. It's just it's using the

GPS on your phone to track where you are. Maybe even it could could use a cellular tower location even if you don't have GPS turned on, because that can at least give you an estimation of where the person is. It's a little less accurate than GPS, but still works. And so you could actually watch as the two people converge by looking at the map and uh to to you know, cuttle point zero where you're going to cuddle um.

And so that also the curious thing about Cuddler was that I think that the founder or Charlie, he really didn't anticipate, you know, that people would be using it as they do Tinder, which is you know, for sex. Yeah. Yeah, there are people using it to kind of hook up. And a lot of folks have described Cuddler as being kind of a creeper app, especially with the the fact that it shows the location on the map. Um that it could be an app for someone to to creep

on some boy, stalk someone harassed somebody. Uh. But Charlie really seems to have his heart in the right place in the sense that he just wanted to build a tool that would let people who have a lack of social interaction and personal contact meet up with other people who are having the same sort of issue. And you know personal contact, I mean actual physical contact. Yeah, it's it's an important part of human interaction and it and it definitely can contribute to our sense of well being,

our sense of fulfillness. If we go without it for a long time, it can lead to depression. I mean, they're there are real reasons why people could crave and need personal contact, but this particular implementation raises a lot of troubling questions. Part of it is just again the

way that the information is displayed. But another part of it is just that if you have if you're catering to a population of people who are lacking that kind of contact, you're probably going to have at least a few cases of negative outcomes, right, I mean you're talking about people who maybe in a very either they themselves are in a very vulnerable place, which can lead to problems, or it could lead to people who are praying upon folks who are in a vulnerable place. Right. So there

is that one account that we both read. The writer from gig Um Carmel Yeah, d M mess I believe. Yeah, she wrote of her experience. She wrote up an entire article which was an entertaining read and also a little a little scary. Yeah, she met up with another young lady. Well, I don't know, young lady. She met up with another lady, and I think she was actually an older woman who

Carmel called Monica. In the article, she explained that she had changed the name to protect Monica's privacy, which I think was the right choice to go to go with, and that she met at Monica's home and yeah, for a cuddle. So the problem there clearly is her not being in a public place and going to the person's home. And it seems like it worked out okay for this writer and good for her for trying and bravery and all that stuff, but also a little alarming that she

went to somebody's house. And as she added that the woman Monica showed her a gun at one point and showed her how to use it. Yeah, to say that, you know, she had worried about safety, and that's when she had gone out and got a gun. And this was all part of the casual conversation. But at the same time, the reporter says it's a little worrisome, and that she had contacted Charlie, the creator of Cutler, and he said, yeah, that was probably not a good idea.

I did and intend for that. When I wrote this app, I was thinking that people would first meet in a safe location, like a public space. But then Carmel's point is, well, if you're already having this this problem of a lack of physical contact, does it add even more anxiety to require it to take place in public where people can see you? And that is a little weird. Yeah. I I respect the idea behind it, I really do. I understand that we all need human interaction and I could

totally use a hug on most days. But but I think we've outlined the problematic aspects of it. Yeah. Now, on a on a personal level, I am I'm big into hugs. I'm a big I'm a big fan of hugs, but only with certain circles of my friends. I have never gotten hug just by the way from me, No, because I don't hug coworkers. Yeah, thinks like a decent policy. There's Yeah, there's there's certain like like worker, Well, I have to because Candice. I mean, how can you How

can you not hug Candice? She's like probably the most huggable person on the planet. But um, yeah, I don't. I don't tend to hug co workers. I put them in a circle where I think these are the types of social interactions that are appropriate for people that I work with. And if I meet them outside of that and we socialize outside of that and they enter another circle of friends, like, if that then diagram has overlap,

that's perfectly acceptable. But otherwise, yeah, I don't. I don't think of it as acceptable for co workers in general. I'm not against it, but on principle, it's just that's kind of how I think. But uh, and strangers don't tend to hug them. Uh, there are exceptions. There have been some people who have been introduced to me and upon introduction, they immediately hugged me. But they did so with such uh genuine charm that I was all right

with it. But it's a really rare thing. In fact, I interviewed one of them just the other day protect stuff. So do you want to hear my idea for an app? Yes, I think that they should be a backscratcher app. You know, I can totally agree to that. So a similar thing, but you have to be I think you have to make the premise or the area of to put the

call at to you much smaller. You don't want to cross town to find finally get that person toscribe because by then the itch is gone, right, the itch is gone, but sometimes you just can't reach it. It's just right there between the shoulder blades. And you know, the more we talk about, the more it's going to actually start to creep into my mind. So I'm going to change the subject. But that's a great idea. Yeah, it's much better than a phone that has a backscratcher that swings

out from it, because that would just bulk. So you mentioned Tender, which is a great app to to refer to as well, because it's so popular that one debuted back in two thousand twelve, and you mentioned that it's owned by match dot com. Uh. Now, the founders like to talk about it as being a social discovery tool that you're you use it to find people to hang out with. And the way tender works is it pulls

photos from Facebook profile. Else then you look at the profile and you can swipe left, left to dismiss it or right if you're interested and you want to make contact with this person. Um. But while they talk about it as a social discovery tool, that's not necessarily it's all about hooking up. It's about you know, it's the hot or not approach. It's you know, this person is

this person I find attractive this one I don't find attractive. No, no, no, yes, no, no no. And um, you know the fact that it has this kind of swipe to dismiss or swipe to accept, really I think drives that home. It actually is, making it a physical activity that you associate with either accepting or rejecting. So I think there's something interesting psychologically there.

I'm not a psychologist, so I certainly can't draw any conclusions, but I would love to hear a study about this kind of behavior and what it sort of feeds into because one of the things one of the criticisms I've read about online dating in general is that it promotes

this kind of shopping behavior. Absolutely, so the idea of of your You're like, it's like you're going through a catalog, and it's not it's not really promoting an interaction so much as this this very rapid except reject kind of approach, and Tender sort of just exemplifies that because of the way the app is built, right, Well, so I wonder what the outcomes ultimately would be from that, Right, So you hook up with somebody on Tender and then you know,

are you If you're just looking for a hook up, that's fun. But if you're looking to date somebody, I mean, what are the outcomes? You know, do you wind up dating having successful like partnerships with people are not so much. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what basis is that split second decision in which you're swiping left or swiping right? Like,

how true is that instinct? Well, and there are people who have said that perhaps the activity of using Tinder itself is more exciting than any actual interaction that follows, that that the thrill of ender is just the use of Tinder, not not not any kind of actual encounter that might follow, but just the the feeling of rejecting or saying this person is attractive to me itself is social activity. It's one that you can do with your friends.

I was reading an article about in the Wall Street Journal about some football players, professional football players I think out of New York, maybe the Jets or the Giants, and they were essentially using Tinder to um find people

without advertising that they were professional football players. And so you know they're sitting around though swipe left, yeah, swipe right, and they were you know, meeting up with some of the people they found on Tinder, and they found it useful for when they were they were away from home at training camp I think, maybe an upstate New York and also to kind of give them a little bit of a layer of anonymity until they were ready to say like, hey, you know, I do this for a living.

And so in that case, they were actually looking at to strip away some of the identifying information that would otherwise bias someone towards them, like, you know, I want to see if this person would be interested in meeting up with me and or at least carrying on a conversation with me before they know what I do for a living, because if they know what I do for a living, I'll never be sure if that's the reason why they pursued me. Yeah, I think that was the idea. Interesting.

And then for those uh you know, Tinder is not itself a new idea. There was actually an app that pre uh that predated Tinder, uh called Grinder that was specifically for gay and bisexual and by curious men to find one another for essentially the purpose of hooking up. Yeah,

it was the first one, I believe. Yeah, so that was that was something that led to the development of other apps, So you can kind of see that as being the genesis of the same sort of idea that we've seen with Tinder and to maybe some extent, Cuddler, even though again Cudler is mostly it's it's intended for non sexual cuddling, or at least that's you know, that

seems to be the intention. It's hard for me to ever say that what was intended without speaking directly to the person who created these acts, but just based upon what I've read, Yeah, so I guess I'm wondering if things like Tinder and Grinder and all these things that are sort of more geared at hooking up, if that makes people change your behavior on online dating sites, Right,

so you can kind of segment out your behavior. Okay, this is what I'm gonna use for hooking up, and this is what I'm going to use to find my lifelong partner. So essentially, the difference between like a real life situation where you might go to a specific club or bar in order for you to find someone to hook up with, versus you know, you're looking seriously for that person who's going to be taking an important part of your life like from that point forward. Absolutely, I

expect that that actually is the case. I mean, I imagine that that is true. UM. I don't know which online dating sites are the most popular for the people who tend to use the apps like Tinder. There are other apps that are more meant to try and bring people together in a social setting without the pressure of this one on one meeting. One of them is called Grouper.

Group sounds really fun. I have to say Grouper is kind of a neat idea, and that you end up creating a group of three and usually, at least the way I've seen it portrayed, it's three people of the same gender who are going after a chance to meet three other people of whichever gender the three prefer. So you know, it doesn't have to be opposite sex, it

could be same sex. But the idea being that you have these three people who have paid into the service to be matched up with three other people that the service has decided appear to be uh compatible for an enjoyable evening. Yet and and the app also includes uh it pays for the first round of drinks for everybody,

so everyone gets one free drink. Yeah, so you get a group of six people together to hang out, and it takes pressure off of the one on one meeting, although it could lead to other really socially awkward situations where maybe two people have interest in one person or let's get out of here man, yeah, which right? Or yeah or you get it, where like, you know, one person gets left out because two of the people are interested in you know, and and in member number one,

one person's interested in member number two. Remember number three is out. Meanwhile, remember number one is like, well great, now I've got these two people after me. Um. So there are a lot of different things that could come up, and it doesn't necessarily have to lead to that. It could just be oh, that was a fun evening out, and now I've got a new group of friends and I can hang out with them and do stuff. So, you know, when you I could see for this is uh so I am not available, but one of my

friends is available. And I would totally be a wing woman. And I think that is a position you can take up when you do these group of things. You can be a wing woman or a wingman. Sure, I actually like to think of myself as a rather good wing woman. I'm terrible. Yeah, I'm a great talker, but I'm also oblivious, so I'm I'm just not in that headspace right So for me, I would be terrible. I would be trying to think of the next funny thing to say just

to make everybody laugh. And I meanwhile, whoever I'm being wingman for is just thinking, just shut up, Jonathan, just just shut up for a minute. Um. What's cool and maybe not cool about Grouper at the same time is you know, how does it come up with how to match you up with another group of people, and it it minds your Facebook information. Now, keep in mind you have to, uh, you have to authorize the app to be able to mind that information. And you can always

keep stuff private. I mean a lot of this ends up being information that's publicly available because you have put it up on Facebook and you didn't set the privacy setting so that it couldn't be seen by other entities. But it does mean that it's going to be looking at everything from your age. It's also gonna look at your ends list because it doesn't want to match up three people with folks that they already know. That's not

the perfect problem in a small town setting, I would think. Yeah, I mean it's it's even a problem just for neighborhoods, right, I mean, Atlanta is in most cities are collections of neighborhoods, and you have people who tend to be very um like like they'll they'll range outward from their neighborhood, but it's it gets increasingly smaller, like the they'll they'll spend less time the further out right, unless they happen to live in a part of town that they just considered

to be dead and they need to go to a different part of town for stuff that happens. But I can definitely see that becoming a challenge, especially if you're a really social person, particularly if you're really social online, because I know people who accept friend requests online. Yeah, they'll have hundreds of them, and most studies say that we're only capable of supporting about a hundred fifty relationships. Oh did you just see that great video we did on that? I know that Ben did a video on

sure it's on brain stuff. I was good. I thought it was super interesting. It's a really good video, right, yeah, yeah, And I had heard about that before we before he had done the video, but he did a great job explaining it. So if you keep that in mind, you might be someone who accepts lots of friend requests anyway. And it may be that you know you've got hundreds

of friends on Facebook. That's gonna narrow down your options when you use something like Grouper that's specifically looking to try and match you up with people you don't know. The one cool thing I will say about Grouper is um, actually, I think it's pretty cool in general. But the one thing I would say about Grouper though, is that I think it's in line with a lot of with how people go out these days, especially the young people. If you got a big group and so it's got that

going on for it's right in line with that. Yeah. And I think again it all depends upon the expectations you bring, right, So if you bring the expectation of I just want to go out and meet some folks, get to know them, have some fun, and then maybe we find out that some of us click and that's awesome. And may be it doesn't happen, but as long as we're having a good time and enjoying ourselves, that's cool too. Like I think, if you go in with the right expectations.

Then you're you're much less likely to you know, pen all your hopes on something that may or may not happen, and thus avoid a crash if it doesn't turn out the way you had hoped. But that's easier said than done. That's said by a guy who's been married seventeen years. So I don't you know, I don't. It's no, I'm not. Then there's a how about we, which is an interesting

app It lets people propose a specific date experience. Now this can actually be between existing couples, where it's really just you could send a message to your your partner and say, how about we, you know, go out for sushi tonight. That could be your thing, Or it could be a way of trying to look for a date where you describe a date that you think would be fun.

You say, how about we go to karaoke, you know and seeing John Cougar Mellencamp song really loudly, and and so you say that, and then you wait to see if anyone responds, and if they do, and it's and it's truly a date experience that you think would be fun and they also think it would be fun. The idea there is that you would be very compatible to have a good time. Maybe nothing romantic comes out of it, but you would be able to have a fun interaction

with another human being doing something you both enjoy. So, uh, from why I understand the people who use how about we tend to be in an older age bracket than the folks who use Tender, but they're using it for you know, kind of similar purpose, not necessarily to hook up, but to have these kind of interactions with people that

they haven't met before. So this was interesting. There's this one called Siren then I came across when I was researching this podcast, and this one is a two thousand fourteen invitation only entrant in the app world, in the dating app world, and the spin here is that the women control their visibility. Right. So the founders is, um,

she's actually very interesting, Susie Lee. She's an artist and she's also the sa EO, and she wanted to give women the power back in these online dating sites and dating apps, and so instead of profiles or swiping left

or right right. So we've kind of already gone through like what maybe problematic with the profile and talked about the swiping business what you do here is you respond to these daily q and a's posted by a sponsor and there I think the sponsors are cultural types like museums or you know, music organizations stuff like that, so not like fast food restaurants or something. Right, but one of the sample questions, one of the sample q and as they said, was that describe your favorite sandwich from

top to bottom. Right, so you see this one pop up on your siren app and you describe it. I think you can also post video and then you can make it visible. And people, I mean, people are pretty witty, people are funny, and for me as an editor, one of the things that I find really attractive about people is their their way with words. So I think reading something, it's it just gets that more of somebody's personality, like

that they're able to show right there. Yeah, yeah, the the way that someone answers a question can tell you a lot about their general thinking process, whether or not you find that to be an attractive feature or not. And yeah, I could certainly see that as being a really cool way of deciding whether or not to try and take that further with an actual interaction. Right. So, so you like the way that this person described their favorite sandwich, and what do you know, The next question

is who's your favorite beatle? The next day and the same person says, like, you know, makes you laugh because it's John Lennon and your favorite beatle is Shohn Lennon. You've got to meet this person. So what you do then is you'd make your information visible to the man. And so that's that's pretty interesting. Again, it's it's kind of a feminist dating app in that, um, you the woman is unlocking her data for the man at her choice.

That's the big premise here. And I know people, some people are gonna be unhappy and why do you need that? But she thought there was a need for it, and I think it's pretty no. I I do too, I think, you know, considering that we're talking about something that in our culture, and in the United States in particular, uh, it tends to be the cultural idea tends to be that the man is in pursuit of the woman and that women are things to be pursued. And that's the

problem there. It's viewing women as things as exactly exactly. So this is an approach that to try and kind of counteract that in a way and Uh, and you know, it's it's a problematic thing because we're talking about a cultural issue. It's deep seated, and it's something that changes very gradually with time and only with effort. Right, It's not something that's gonna spontaneously change. So I like seeing this kind of creative approach because I do want to

see that model eventually change. I would like to see there to be a little more equality here between the genders. Um. So, once you just side you like somebody, and if maybe you're feeling like you want to meet somebody, you can put out what's called a siren call, and that's basically like you're interacting with people to see if anybody's up

for something. I love that it's a siren call. Yeah, it's kind of awesome, right, yeah, because that doesn't have any kind of uh, you know, sinister overtones, do it at all? For those of us who enjoy things like the Odyssey? But no, it is pretty funny. Uh. We can't have this discussion without bringing to light an app that was truly problematic, one that came up in two thousand and twelve called Girls Around Me. Now, this app was one that that Allison, you had not heard about right,

I don't think so. I heard about it because I was very much following all the tech news at the time, and it was one that I immediately found to be troubling. Now, it was troubling in a very kind of, hey, it's not our fault kind of way, which makes it doubly troubling to me. The app pulled information from four Square

and from Facebook. Now again, to use these things, you uh, you know, you create your profiles and you are actively sharing things, so that that seems to be the justification of well, it's okay for us to make this app then, because people are active, Yeah, they're they're the ones presenting this information. We're just aggregating it and displaying it um. But part of the problem is, I think not everyone is aware of exactly the implications of sharing their data.

They're thinking, oh, I'm I'm checking into this restaurant because I really like the restaurant and I just want my friends to know, and I think it's kind of cool, and you know, get and I get bonuses if I check in enough times. So what this app was doing was it was pulling the check in information from four Square and pulling Facebook profiles that were connected to those four square profiles and pulling in pictures and information about people. So if I had the app and I wanted to

use it, I could pull it up. It would pull up a map show the check ins surrounding my area. If I click on any of them, it would show me pictures from the Facebook profile of the person who had checked in. I could even look at their profile and get more information about them, like what they like, what their name is, how old they are, And so a lot of people pointed out that this could really facilitate stalkers, right, I mean, if I look up a person, I think, oh, she's cute. Oh, and she likes these

bands and this is her name. I could walk up to her and say, hey, there Susie. Uh yeah, you know this band is coming to town again and I was just thinking maybe we could go check it out. Yeah. Especially, you could present yourself as if this person already knew you, and that is very problematic. So especially find that problematic for for younger people. Yeah, yeah, especially for anyone again who is not truly aware of the implications of sharing. And we see this a lot where people just don't

really think of the consequences of sharing. A lot of information. Well, it caused so much commotion, and that four Square pulled the API, the part of their their programming that allows people to develop apps to take advantage of four squares capabilities. They pulled it, so it took away the functionality of the app, and eventually the the Russian company that created the app removed it from the iTunes store because it was broken. You couldn't use it anymore because the four

Square functionality have been pulled from it. But it certainly was one of those things that opened up a lot of eyes about the potential dangers of using these kind of apps. So it is important to have this human interaction, and we don't want to discourage people from having human interaction, but you have to do it with the right context.

You have to do it with the right mind for your safety, into your security and just whatever it is that you're hoping to get out of it, that you have the right expectations for it, because otherwise bad things could happen. It's just that's that's the Yeah. Yeah, as we pointed out, a lot of solid relationships, it's true. Yeah, there's been a lot of studies about online dating that

have suggested that there are lots of benefits. Gives you a lot more chances to meet a potential partner, so your your h pool of potential partners is increased, meaning that you have a chance of finding that relationship that

gives you real meaning and in a sense of fulfillment. Um. It helps cut down on potentially threatening context because you can have those early interactions in an online space as opposed to a physical space, and you can determine quickly which ones are the ones that are most promising and which ones you think are not going to lead anywhere

or are undesirable. So that's an advantage as well. Uh, it gives you the chance to omit people from that pool if you realize very early on, like no, this is not what I want, this person is not and I are not going to click. Um. Now, we talked about the shopping downside with the objectification of people. You treat them as objects. This person is hot, this person not hot. That is an issue. Uh, it's really easy to to just blast through people as if they are

just data and that isn't that's a problem. Objectifying people is not not a great outcome psychologically speaking. Um. And also that matching with personality types appears to have a relatively minor role in romantic attraction or relationship success. So even if you find that person who on paper is a perfect match for you, it doesn't guarantee that you will have a happy relationship with that person. It's more

to it than that. And uh, again, it doesn't help that we can't necessarily know what we're actually looking for when we go out looking for that potential someone. We think we do, yeah, because we think we know exactly the things that are going to appeal to us. But that's not always the case, you know. They say like the opposites attract. Part of that is to say that if you go and find someone who's exactly like yourself, you may not find that to be a rewarding experience.

I know that if my wife are exactly like I am, one of us would have killed the other one. By now, it would have happened. One of me is more than enough, is what I'm saying. But the studies show that online relationships can be just as stable as those that were formed offline. So online is a great way to meet people,

it's and it can lead to a happy, stable relationship. Um, it's just important that you know, you take that expectation and you check it to make sure that you're not going in with with with online stars in your eyes and m so I think the end of the day, we say use use online tools if that's what you're You know, when you're looking for someone, whether you're looking for someone to hang out with or you're looking for someone to potentially be uh, you know that that special

someone in your life, but do so with critical thinking, do so with safety in mind. Do so knowing that that's another person at the end of that profile, you know, not an object. That is another person, eman being with feelings. They've got hopes, they've got dreams, they've got aspirations, they've got fears, they've got doubts about themselves. And if you keep that in mind, and you're more likely to have a human interaction as opposed to something that crashes and

burns and is a terrible experience for everybody. UM, I don't know why I'm giving dating advice. I'm not necessarily an authority on the subject. I'm just a very empathetic kind of person that I did have a blast researching this podcast. Yeah, it's fascinating world of modern love. Yeah, I'm really uh and that's a great song by David Bowie. I'm really um hoping that we can find more studies that show really what was the psychological impact of some

of these approaches. I'm very curious to see what the tender approach is like. Uh. From that, From that a psychological perspective, I often I also think that most of the people who are using tender tend to be in an age group where it's you know, they're not necessarily looking for the person who's going to be with them for the rest of their lives. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Again, assuming that everyone's going in with

equal expectations. Um, So I don't necessarily think it's harmful in the long run. It may just be one of those phases of maturity, right so um. But again I'm not an expert on that either. This is a lot of armchair psychology from Jonathan today. Alison, thank you so much for joining me. I had a blast, Jonathan, thanks for having me. Yeah, Alison is an incredibly busy woman.

She and it's a lot of the articles that you see at how stuff works dot com and if you've ever visited the site and thought, Wow, this site is awesome. A huge part of that comes from Allison makes make sure that the awesome gets through and they'm not awesome doesn't get through. So uh, Alison, keep fighting the good fight.

You're doing great work. And guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, maybe there's some other aspect of technology that you've always wondered more about, like what's the cultural impact of something, or just how something works? Right in ask me a question my email addresses tex stuff at how stuff works dot com, or dropped me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle at all three is tech Stuff H. S W

and I'll talk to you again. Really sick for more on this and bathands of other topics because it has to have works dot Com