It was way back in 2006 when Palm showed us how to beam our love to strangers using the quaintly unconnected Palm V. But since then, a whole litany of apps have made the quest for strange much more direct.
Match.com has had success with their iPhone app, which lets you keep your profile up-to-date on the go. For people with a more active approach, there’s Loopt, which works on almost every phone you can think of, smart and dumbphones alike. It’s a location-finding app with a meet-nearby-strangers feature called Loopt Mix, and is known for more prurient uses, versus, say, meeting a friend for coffee.
Then there’s Skout, which bills itself as a location-based “dating” app for iPhones. It lets you strike up conversations with nearby people, follow their photos, and see their profiles.
Once you find that special someone-of-the-moment, you can perform an instant background check on them using your iPhone. Announced this week, the DateCheck app has a feature called “sleaze detector” that checks an individual’s name for criminal records of assault, drug, and alcohol-related arrests. More disheartening is a feature that can assess a person’s net worth. Check it out below.