Tech + Love = ?
There is a sense of truth in everything, even in chick flicks stating “love is everywhere”. If you look back through History, you will quickly notice love and passion have always been universal obsessions. While poets wrote sonnets about infatuation, musicians would chant the odes of love, painters depicted its traits, and well, in our digital era, it makes sense tech savvies brought their pinch of salt, by creating tools aiming to facilitate love and how we build relationships.
Infatuation, desire, lust, fear of abandonment, love, relationships were always universal obsessions, and of course, if technology and progress disrupted all pans of our lives, why should not they impact the way we meet, interact, and love each other?
Tinder in (vertiginous) numbers
With Valentines Day at the corner, it is fair to say that, without the magic of matching, some of us may be enjoying — or not — a single night out. Let be clear about this: from the early days of the Internet, online dating was already a big thing, and the rise of mobile apps took the deal to the next level.
With 50 million users, and 20% of them active daily, an average of 1.6 billion swipes, and 26 millions of daily matches, mobile dating plays a significant role in our romantic lives.
And Tinder apparently is one of the most successful dating apps. How to explain such a success? Did we get lonelier, or did Tinder directly provided the features digital love needed to flourish?
Simple features and proximity are everything
With a range of simple but effective features, Tinder has known how to attract users from its very beginning in 2012. Not only Tinder has through each release and update managed to improve its user’s acquisition, and most importantly the user’s retention that was necessary to make the app relevant.
Tinder main features consist in connecting users based on their geographic proximity, which makes it easy for users to meet on a short or long-term perspective. By engaging the users to sign up via Facebook, Tinder facilitates the collection of the data needed to establish matches.
Coding and romance
Three pillars are equally essential to building an app like Tinder or any apps aiming to host a large number of users safely.
- The Presentation Layer. We are talking here about an essential aspect of the app, the simple design but also its usability that enables anyone to match with people in the near easily. Creating a simple but beautiful looking interface requires the use of the following programming languages: XML, HTML5, CSS, etc.…And Tinder owes its success to this simplicity enabling the user to quickly see the ocean of potential matches ahead.
- The Business Logic Layer gathers the tools, which are needed to build lists of searchable terms and therefore ensure the match-making. They are made through a series of java and python applications. The business Logic Player enables the users to select the gender they are interested in, the age, but also thanks to the connection via Facebook to see mutual interests, friends and acquaintances, which creates a feeling of safety and reliability for both users.
- The database is the place where the information provided by the users are processed and stored, but also the searchable terms created in the Business Logic Layer. Together, these pieces of data and information enable the matching, and let the romance be.
Technology has not changed love nor how we love. However, it brought new ways of meeting and interacting by bringing new disposable tools to the table. Geolocalisation made possible for individuals, who sometimes were crossing each other on a daily basis, to notice each other and to meet. If some will denounce threats in technology, those risks are like everything else in life. Technology is a tool that can genuinely simplify our lives, and it’s all about how we choose to use it. We can make the most out of it, and it can also unveil the worst aspect of humanity. Like any other disposable tool.
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