Tinder recently announced that it will roll out a new app that will help people connect with others in non-romantic, platonic ways.
Meet Tinder Social, Tinder's social planning app that will aid users in creating groups and establishing connections with like-minded people.
The dating app that reigns supreme over its rivals touted that it will expand its features of meeting people and creating connections with those near you. The company carried out a beta testing of Tinder Social in Australia, and the results were promising enough for a global release.
Sean Rad, the CEO and co-founder of Tinder, says that the beta was essential to developing the service.
"Our users were very much focused on immediacy and cared about what they wanted to do tonight," Rad says. He adds that the Australia launch helped steer Tinder Social toward encouraging users to coordinate for short-term planning.
Using Tinder Social, users are able to add friends to their group through Facebook, after which they can match with similar groups from the area.
One member of one group must match with a person from the other for the members of both groups to get the "Match" message. This provides both groups access to the common chat room, which includes all the members from the respective groups.
To summarize, just as in romantic connections, group matches must be mutual, albeit it is enough for only one person from each party to swipe right.
One issue in the Australian beta was Tinder Social's auto opt-in feature. What it meant was that users who had the feature set to "unlocked" were able to see the Tinder profiles of every Facebook friend from their list. Quite a number of testers regarded this as a privacy faux pas, as most users choose to have their Tinder profile discretely tucked away from public display.
Fortunately, the public launch of Tinder Social will be opt-in. Users will be able to use the traditional Tinder, the new Tinder Social, or both. There is an extra incentive for users who'll choose to have both variants of the app unlocked, as this will reveal both individuals and groups in their feed.
The United States, the United Kingdom and a few other markets will soon benefit from the feature. Tinder touts that its Social app is the first in many new and engaging social interaction tools.
"This is just our first step in building up the tools to ignite your social life," Tinder's blog entry reads.
Tinder Social is far from being the first app that attempts to ease people into connecting with other intentions outside hook-ups. Bumble, for example, is a dating app that introduced the BFF mode this spring, allowing users to meet others just to be good friends. Other notable examples of friend-making oriented apps are Squad and Grouper, with the latter only being available in New York at the moment.
So far, social planning apps flopped, but Tinder claims that its user base of more than 10 million people might make Tinder Social a different experience.
Are you eager to try it out? Let us know in the comments section below.
