Grindr , the wildly successful, male-only location-based hookup facilitator for gay, bisexual and gay-curious men, has registered 2 million users in two years. Now, the creator of Grindr has launched a new app Blendr that replicates Grindr's template, with one key twist: it allows women to register, too. You look at Facebook and you can share things, but you can't really meet new people. With Blendr there will be no better way to make new friends. There's reason to be skeptical of Simkhai's stated purpose, given that Grindr, which promises to be "quick, convenient, and discreet," is more dating site than social network.
But Simkhai says that Blendr and Grindr have little in common in terms of aim or purpose: Blendr has "evolved from Grindr, they're cousins," he says. This is a friendship app, this is a meeting app. This is for that year-old guy who wants to play poker and wants to find guys or girls of any age group who also want to play poker around him. Despite Simkhai's stated aspirations for the app, I have to believe that Blendr has either been set up as, or will live or die by its success as, a heterosexual hookup app.
No matter how noble Simkhai's intentions, its association with Grindr has pigeonholed it as a "Grindr for heterosexuals," whether Simkhai likes it or not. Moreover, Blendr and Grindr really are very, very, very similar. Besides the identical omission of the letter 'E' in the app name, the user interface of Blendr also looks exactly like that of Grindr:.
After choosing eight of the hundreds of interests that you believe best define you and what you like to do, you are shown the grid of faces above, representing people who are in your vicinity. Visually, this screen looks exactly like the main screen on Grindr; and though Simkhai says that the sorting algorithm is a bit different, the fact that potential friends appear via photographs of their faces and not, say, listed by their usernames and common interests, speaks volumes about how this app will be approached by the mass public.
Testing out the app for myself over the course of a week, I found myself clicking more often on the users with striking profile pictures: Since all I could see on the grid was faces, how else would I choose?
