Grindr has all the time excelled at serving to its customers discover people trying to spend some high quality time collectively, however the hookup app is trying to pace up the “looking?” course of much more with its newest function.
In the present day, Grindr introduced that Proper Now, its social media-like reside feed function, is rolling out to the entire platform’s customers following a pilot test in select markets. Not like Grindr’s conventional grid that reveals you an array of different customers’ profiles based mostly on how far-off they’re, Proper Now features a bit extra like X / Twitter and shows a stream of latest posts that may embrace each textual content and images.
Proper Now posts disappear from the reside feed after an hour, and whereas they don’t have for use for hookup functions, posters can hit a toggle specifying whether or not they’re trying to host (learn: have somebody over for enjoyable.) At launch, Grindr says customers in sure areas “will obtain various free hour-long Proper Now periods per week (refreshed each Friday)” that means that the feed will solely be accessible in hour-long home windows. Down the road, the corporate additionally plans to make extra periods accessible to buy.
Grindr
In a press release about the new feature, Grindr’s chief product officer, AJ Steadiness, defined that Proper Now was designed to assist individuals “discover precisely what they need, when they need it – with out the guesswork.”
“We constructed this intention-based function based mostly on suggestions from our group to allow them to join with like-minded individuals with out losing time on mismatched expectations,” Steadiness stated. “The response to our preliminary March launch was so robust we accelerated the worldwide rollout forward of schedule as a result of it’s clear individuals need this… nicely, proper now.”
Grindr is just not the primary app of its sort to introduce performance clearly impressed by social media platforms. Sniffies, a extra cruising-focused Grindr competitor that doesn’t require signing up for an account and permits customers to submit sexually express images on their public profiles, has had a function much like Proper Now for a while. However Proper Now’s widespread launch is the newest section of Grindr’s larger plan to roll out a series of new features — a lot of that are powered by generative synthetic intelligence — meant to spice up income and make customers see the app as “the World Gayborhood in Your Pocket™.”
Beforehand, Grindr launched A-Record, a instrument that makes use of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 mannequin and Amazon Net Providers’ Bedrock to summarize chats with the intention of serving to customers rekindle “significant previous connections” and pursue “high-potential matches.” Bloomberg reports the identical platform is now underpinning Grindr’s Wingman, a generative AI assistant that may draft chat responses for customers who can’t consider issues to say for themselves, provide sex tips, and provides ideas about locations that may make for good dates. A few of Grindr’s AI options are free to attempt, however for continued entry to them, the corporate requires customers to enroll in its month-to-month subscription plans.
The entire options are a part of Grindr’s effort to usher in extra money and staunch the monetary bleeding that got here following its preliminary public providing in 2022. As Platformer reported last year, Grindr’s inventory value plummeted by 70 % following its SPAC, and the corporate has been scrambling to determine new income streams amid worker unionization efforts and inside issues that Grindr “was dropping its progressive tradition.”
On the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference this week, Grindr’s CEO George Arison spoke about how AI has modified his personal productiveness, and his want for the corporate to begin serious about how the expertise will be extra deeply built-in into its providers.
“For all the brand new issues that we construct, I would like them to be constructed as if we’re an AI-native startup,” Arison stated. “When you’re going to do advertising for this, nice; begin pondering with AI first after which go to individuals as a result of that’s how I believe corporations are going to be constructed shifting ahead and that’s what we ought to be doing as a enterprise as nicely.”