How Tinder works...and why

The Dating Game 2.0.

If you've heard a lot about dating apps, but are not quite sure how they work, or why anyone would use them, there was an insightful recent article in the NY Times that explains the most popular app, Tinder, comparing it to other, more established web dating applications, such as Match.com.

Essentially, once a user signs up and includes a few pictures (generally from your Facebook archives), the mobile app finds other registered users and presents your photo to them, and likewise, you see photos of those around you.  You swipe one direction to indicate interest and the other direction to suggest you're interested in meeting someone.  Then--and only then--can they message you.  Basically, two mutually interested parties are able to make contact by text, followed by face-to-face contact if both are still keen after the text exchange.

The author, Molly Wood (her real name?) admits that while this approach, based mostly on physical looks, seems a bit superficial at least and 'sleazy' at worst, it is also the appeal of the application, namely its easy-to-use simplicity and unpretentious nature.  It also feels like a game, where you decline others' advances by saying 'still playing,' which says this is not necessarily a search for a life partner (although the author admits being in a promising relationship that started with Tinder).

The comparison with match-making sites is that Tinder is not trying to play matchmaker, it is just helping you play the field, with the advantage of knowing who else is playing on the same field.

But why is there an overall surge in dating apps?  Functionalist sociologists and animal behiorists will tell you that dating rituals are necessary and important to help individuals let down their guard enough for would-be suitors to become intimate enough to mate.  Not very romantic, but it does help us understand the role that dating apps serve in connected and busy societies.

Dating apps reduce at least some of the anxiety of approaching strangers who are not interested in us personally, or not interested in dating in general.  By letting us contact the 'maybe' persons around us, the odds of carrying on a conversation over a drink go up substantially.  Plus, by making it look and feel like a game, it perhaps bring a playfulness to first encounters, which is both fitting and helpful, in most cases.

For those of us with soul mates and those still looking, Happy Valentines Day!

Rate, rank, review...right back at you!

Giving feedback is a good thing, right?  We love heaping praise (or scorn) on those who serve us.  It makes them better, stronger, faster!  And, it makes us feel so much better.

But, the tables may be turning as this article in the NY Times suggests, where taxi drivers are now rating their Uber customers.  So, be careful what you say about the cabby, or next time you may be refused service or treated as consumer non grata. Of course, honest rewards for good behaviour makes sense.  But, just as tipping can become an expectation, what happens when the game becomes two parties gaming each other with both parties' reputation at stake?

Is this a good thing?  I couldn't possibly comment.

See my earlier post on Rate, rank and review and the cult of verification.

Global Connectivity Webinar - 29 January 2015

On the 29th of January (North American time), I will be participating in a webinar on 'global connectivity' sponsored by the Global Connectivity Research Institute (GCRI).

 

The Global Connectivity Research Institute has developed tools to help dynamically visualize official global connectivity of every state on earth and most of the regional and global bodies, organizations, etc. to which those states belong as those bodies have evolved throughout deep history. This is real perspective. This is the foundation on which realistic deep strategic thinking, leading, and planning rests.

Join us on the 29th of January 2015 for the webinar.

 

Presenters include Timothy (Tim) Williamson, Founder and Director of GCRI, Admiral Kikareas PhD (HN Ret.), Capt. Wayne Porter PhD (USN Ret.), and myself. 

More details below

Updated 4 March 2015

Audio recording of my talk, click here.

----------------------------

 

Global Connectivity Research Institute (GCRI)

“seeking to understand the origin, evolution, and trajectory of human connectivity”

www.global-connectivity-research.org

tim@global-connectivity-research.org

1-205-765-6090

______________________________________________________________________________

 

The 29th is almost here. Please register for the webinar.

 

16 Jan 2015

Webinar Information:

·        Title: “How an empirical knowledge of human connectivity should inform deep strategic thinking, leading, & planning.”  

o   For deep thinkers and strategic leaders, and those who want to be - the work of GCRI resolves the classic conundrum between the value of  a posteriori vs a priori based understanding in favor of an empirical foundation on which deep strategic thinking can be finally realized. It’s all a matter of information, perspective, and scale  - said the cat to Alice (massively paraphrased of course TW - adapted from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ 1865).

·        Purpose:

o   Reason #1:

§  To provide a tool to easily visualize regional and global connectivity of every state and official organization on the planet from a current and historical perspective

o   Reason #2:

§  To provide the platform from which the connectivity in the visualization tool may be studied, analyzed, and projections made from an empirical foundation so that a more precise strategic narrative can be made with the greatest possible perspective.

o   Reason #3:

§  Provide insight into how best to utilize an understanding of the origin, evolution, & trajectory of human connectivity to make informed deep strategic decisions.

·        YouTube short videos about the webinar and GCRI on KUMU:

o   GCRI video  Webinar info

o   GCRI video  How are Russia, the USA, and Myanmar connected?

·        Applicability:

o   Governments

o   Militaries

o   NGO’s

o   IGO’s

o   Regional and global governance bodies & organizations

o   Business

o   Academics

·        Schedule:

o   29 Jan 2015 between 1000 & 1300 CST USA (between 1400 &1900 UTC)

Bio update of presenters:

1.     Admiral Peter Kikareas PhD,

a.     Hellenic Navy, NATO, Retired

b.     Europe, Eurasia & Mediterranean subject matter expert

c.     Has worked with US DHS

d.     lives in Florida

 

2.               Capt. Wayne Porter PhD

a.               US Navy, former head of the Complex Sciences Department at the Naval Post Grad School, Retired

b.               Co-Founder of National Strategic Narrative, and co-author of the document produced by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2011 by the same name, both in collaboration with LtCol Mark Mykleby (USMC Retired)

 

3.               Dr. Darl Kolb (PhD, Cornell)

a.               Professor of Connectivity in the Graduate School of Management at the University of Auckland Business School, Auckland, New Zealand.

b.               a pioneering theorist on social and technical connectivity.

c.               Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge.  

d.               Makes presentations around the world, most recently to the US Army.

e.               He discusses the connects and disconnects of life on his blog, Connectivity Corner (drdarlkolb.blogspot.com).

4.               Timothy ‘Tim’ Williamson

 .                 Founder and creator of GRCI

a.               Creator of GCRI on KUMU - mappings of the origin and evolution of official regional and global connectivity of states and IGO’s.

b.               Numerous papers on academia.edu

c.               LinkedIn Profile for more info

Best of 2014

Sitting in Puerto Natales, Chile, at what has been called del fin del Mundo, reflecting on the past year, before entering Torres del Paine national park.  The terrain and flora remind us of New Zealand in many ways, but Patagonia is also a very unique region and a wonderful part of the world.

This is not a travelogue about connectivity, but I have been reminded of the power of language to connect or disconnect humans.  And, more profoundly, I have witnessed how a single individual, in this case one of the young members of our group, was able to make more friends in the space of 4 days in El Chalten than anyone I have ever seen.  The point is that some Gen Y folks are capable of networking in real life and new environments as well as they do on line.  A reminder not to pigeonhole or pre-judge generations.

As for the best of 2014...

I am presently reading the best novel related to our connected world, not just of 2014, but probably of the past decade.  The book is The Circle, by Dave Eggers (Vintage, 2013).  Not since Douglas Coupland's Microserfs has there been such an astute account of tech culture coupled with an intriguing contemporary story line.  The story takes place on a over-achieving tech campus (think Google meets Facebook on steroids), where seemingly helpful and well-intended utopian desires of tech mega-corporations reveal the dark side of universal ubiquitous connectivity and shrinking personal privacy.  A great read!  I highly recommend it!

Best non-fiction documentary of the year in my view is Generation Like, a PBS Hard Line report on the high need for teens to be liked on social media and the general medias exploitation of this phenomenon.  Notwithstanding my comment above about not judging generations, this video account makes for scary watching, if one considers the implications of high needs for social approval, especially when played out and manipulated by masterful marketing.

That's it for now.  Off to the mountains to disconnect.

'Unified communications' is coming

What is unified communication?

Entrepreneur Toby Ruckert knows what ‘unified communications’ is and you don’t have to spend much time with Toby—as I have recently done in Singapore--to believe the importance of what might be described as a movement--or perhaps migration is a better word--toward unified communication as a popular, if not indispensable, service.

Unified communication means bringing all our communication threads and sources (email, social media, chat and ‘check-in’ apps) together in one place.  And, that is what Toby’s company Unified Inbox does.  With 8,000 users waiting for beta versions, the popularity of the notion is significant and growing. 

Once communication sources are wrangled into a single inbox, users can manage all communications in one place, one screen.  Managing might mean ranking messages by importance, or grouping by source (people) or topics, or other meaningful criteria.  Such features are showing up more and more within a given medium.  See, for example, the proliferation of ‘filtering’ tools popping up.

G-mail users can request and get helpful analytics regarding your email use patterns.

Other applications, like Checky, Moment and Offtime allow you toggle off and otherwise manage your incoming media to get a digital break.    So, the ‘Filter Wars’ have begun.

Unified communications, however, goes beyond filtering within a single medium.   Unified communication services allow users to carry on conversations with friends or colleagues, who are each using different messaging media (say LinkedIn, Facebook, WeChat, SnapChat, etc.) without launching and re-launching different apps.  Users could cut and paste text across platforms, but bridging fractures and inconsistencies between communication streams is hard work.

Unified Inbox will ultimately allow organisations to 'unify' their communications and help interested users to improve their communication patterns and performance (effectiveness and efficiency).  The latter is a research project I am currently working on with colleagues in academia and industry.

The digital divide is growing

Living in an 'infrastructure challenged' setting, it is not lost on me that even as the uptake of Internet connectivity is rapidly expanding, it also slow to reach many of the world's population.  And, importantly, the digital divide is growing, according to a recent McKinsey report, titled 'Off-line and falling behind.'

The report offers several reasons why certain groups are slow to adopt Internet services and suggests that four factors, including 'incentives,' 'low incomes and affordability,' 'user capabilities' and 'infrastructure.'

Moreover, the factors are often compounding and inter-related, according to McKinsey.

"We measured the performance of 25 countries against a basket of metrics relating to each category of barriers to develop the Internet Barriers Index.⁵ 5.The Internet Barriers Index ranks 25 developed and developing countries based on their scores in four categories of barriers: incentives, low incomes and affordability, user capability, and infrastructure. To create the index, we defined a basket of standard metrics to quantify each category of barriers, normalized each metric to a scale of 100 points, weighted each of the metrics equally within each category to generate barrier category scores, and then normalized and weighted each of the category scores equally to generate the final index score. Our analysis indicated that the Internet Barriers Index has a strong ability to predict the Internet penetration within a country, explaining more than half the variance in Internet penetration across countries. We found that all factors correlate strongly and separately with Internet penetration, and all regressions indicate an elastic effect on Internet penetration—that is, improvements on each individual pillar of the Internet Barriers Index will have a disproportionately positive impact on Internet penetration. In addition, we found a systematically positive and, in some cases, large correlation between barrier categories. This implies that the factors are not totally independent and that countries with low Internet penetration tend to have multidimensional bottlenecks when it comes to increasing their Internet adoption. Further, it means that meaningfully addressing these barriers and boosting Internet penetration will require coordination across Internet ecosystem participants."

While it appears that this is a developed versus a developing world phenomenon, I have observed that connectivity is 'lumpy' all around the world and that "we're all a little bit third world."

3 reasons why we constantly check our phones

Why do people constantly check their smartphones? 

I was recently asked this question by Finland's top newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat.  Click for story in Finnish.

There are a lot of specific reasons, but here are 3 drivers of this behaviour.  

First, think of rosary or ‘worry beads,’ which humans have held in their hands for millennia; the tactile touch is reassuring and something simple to do when we are nervous or bored—this is the physical/material factor of handheld devices. This could also be called the boredom factor. 

Second, there is the avoidance factor, i.e., when we are in (even slightly) awkward social situations and want to avoid eye contact with others, we relieve the social pressure by gazing into our handheld screens instead of meeting the eyes of a stranger.  This makes perfect sense as the cost of engagement with others adds up in dense social settings.  We do this naturally in busy city streets where we cannot look into every passing strangers’ eyes, so we tend to avoid all eye contact, reserving our attention to the familiar, like a friendly message or favourite app on our smartphone.  

Finally, there is the fear factor as some of us are driven by the ‘fear of missing out' (FOMO), that feeling that something interesting and important MIGHT be happening and we want to know about it, i.e., we don’t want to ‘miss out' on what's going on.  Of course, much of life happens to be more or less mundane, so the odds of something truly significant happening is low, but still probable enough to not ‘risk’ missing it.  This latter drive is understandably heightened in younger users, where the need for social inclusion and acceptance is relatively high.