It’s for gay, bi, curious and it’s daft. It is an iPhone “quick, convenient, and discreet” application to find a date. So they say.

Thus the other day, whilst trying to have a drink and a conversation in a busy bar of Soho, I could not but notice the unusual behaviour of my friend: looking at his iPhone, then around the room, back to his iPhone and then scouting the room again. What was he up to? Sending SMS to a potential date? Better ask than talking to myself.

It turned up that some Californian geek came up with an iPhone application that allows users to locate other users based on the GPS technology. Once registered, the App shows pictures of nearby users and how far they are.

“Make it (no I will not name it!) your go-to place and see who’s looking to meet up tonight. No matter where you find yourself, [it] is the go-to app for socializing in seconds with the guys around you.”

So here we are, in the middle of a gay bar in the heart of London’s gay district surrounded by gay guys checking their iPhone – rather than socialising with the guys sitting next to them or talking to their friends, then looking around searching for another guy who they know is nearby. How daft is that? Not only it is the anti-thesis of socialisation, but it is far to be discreet when everybody is visibly doing the same thing. So why bother and not go straight for the old chat up line?

“It’s easy to find a nearby guy in no time” claims the website. Err… aren’t we in a gay bar? Is that hard to look around and see the real thing? Or have people become that socially disabled? The best was that when we finally found the sporty 25 years old pictured on the iPhone, he looked more like a baldy 35 years old. No surprise there as people rarely look like their online profile picture. Worst he was not alone but with a friend and guess what they were doing… checking their iPhone.

Nevertheless, I am sure this will be a hit, if it is not already one considering the number of people I have since then noticed using it. It was even featured about 6 months ago on Top Gear, an obnoxious macho car-show.

And thus we spent part of the evening very discreetly scouting the room, bitching about people and if the conversation was even more vacuous than usual, at least we spoke to each other.

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