Eeew how sleazy!” It’s not the usual way that my sister might react to finding out where I met a boyfriend. But that’s because we were introduced not in the real world, or through a conventional dating website, but on Grindr, a free smartphone dating app for gay men. It has a reputation as a place to find partners for casual sex but, as I discovered to my surprise, it’s also the perfect place to find love.

For the uninitiated, Grindr is a phenomenon that has totally changed the gay community in London, its most popular and active city, with more than 500,000 users. In other words, about two-thirds of gay men in London use the app (even if they won’t admit it).

In the old days before Grindr, if you wanted to use technology to find love, you had to search for someone based on particular characteristics; their looks, their age, their interests and so on, on dating websites. The process was a little like online shopping and very deliberate, not like meeting someone unexpectedly in the real world at a party or through a friend.

Grindr and other apps like it use GPS on your phone to just show you the 100 closest gay people to you right now and you can’t search Grindr other than by age. The 100 people you see change all the time as they and you move around London. What Grindr also does is highlight the people around us that we might never have met. As Grindr’s founder Joel Simkhai told me: “If you’re gay there is a basic problem of knowing which guys are actually gay around you. Grindr solves this problem.”

For the full story:

http://www.standard....dr-8322951.html

Oz I thought it was your story at first... Interesting... Maybe I will try it sometime...