Grindr: The new frontier of casual sex?

A wildly popular GPS-enabled iPhone app allows gay men to hone in on nearby hookups. Will a new heterosexual version take off, too?

It's being called the evolution of online dating: Grindr — an iPhone app originally designed to help gay males find sex partners using GPS-enabled technology — is going heterosexual, with a new version launching later this year. Grindr, which already has over 700,000 gay fans, makes hooking up convenient by "tantalizingly" listing potential mates by their distance (in feet) from the user's location. Will the straight Grindr, as some bloggers say, revolutionize casual sex the way online dating changed courtship? (Watch a profile about Grindr)

Grindr's impact could be profound: This sexual equivalent of ordering takeout will drastically "reconfigure the the landscape of human relationships," says Polly Vernon at The Guardian's Observer blog. Using Grindr offers an "intoxicating" rush on par with the first time I searched Google; it's clear it will "alter things on a profound level." This application is either "brilliant" or "disastrous," depending on who you talk to, but "either way, it matters."

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