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“Guys are like dogs. They keep coming back. Ladies are like cats. Yell at a cat one time ... they're gone.” - Lenny Bruce

Several services are now popping up to help singles find other singles out in the physical space using GPS. Today, “there are dozens of GPS dating apps to choose from: SinglesAroundMe, MeetMoi, Badoo, Assisted Serendipity and Skout, just to name a few.” (Laura Silverman) The difficulty highlighted in the NPR article “Smartphone Apps Help More Singles Find The Boy (Or Girl) Next Door (http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/08/20/159365445/smartpho...) is the gender gap. The gender gap is fundamental to the success of this paradigm of meeting and dating. It also reveals interesting differences in what information men and women think is valuable in this realm.

It’s strange to think about, but dating is a huge information retrieval problem. If you could date forever then maybe you could meet your match by enumeration, however we all have a limited amount of time and if time is not the limit, it’s patience. We all need some help sometimes. With these new GPS services, geared to help people meet, they are assuming knowing someone is within distance is valuable information to meet the generic goal of dating.

However, it is turning out this information is more valuable to men than it is to women. This is reflected in the adoption rate of several of these services; men out number women by a factor of 4 to 1. Because of this skewed adoption the service is less valuable to men because of the intrinsically low recall. This also provides an intimidating atmosphere for women who maybe trying out the service. One of the main complaints women have is being hounded by male users.

What might help the services increase adoption by female users; is to filter who gets what information. For instance if a woman user is in the vicinity of another male user it will not automatically notify them, especially not the man. Instead it will give the woman priority but checking to see if the male user is a match (somehow). If it meets her expectations, presumably by her profile settings, then the male user has the option of messaging. She could also get the information for males who are not her “ideal” match and decide to approach or message. This increases the relevance of a particular interaction based on categorical settings chosen by the female user and hopefully aligning precision and recall for them.

I’m not entirely sure I like these services which makes me think my anima is writing this conclusion, however the services, to succeed, will need to address this issue of relevance to help the growth of adoption of female users and to the ultimate growth of the service.