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 velocity up the “looking?” course of much more with its declaration characteristic.
As we speak, Grindr introduced that Proper Now, its social media-like dwell feed characteristic, is rolling out to the entire platform’s customers following a pilot test in select markets. Not like Grindr’s conventional grid that exhibits you an array of different customers’ profiles primarily based on how distant they’re, Proper Now capabilities a bit extra like X / Twitter and shows a stream of current posts that may embody each textual content and photographs.
Proper Now posts disappear from the dwell 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 places “will obtain plenty of free hour-long Proper Now periods per week (refreshed each Friday)” which 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 characteristic primarily based on suggestions from our neighborhood to allow them to join with like-minded individuals with out losing time on mismatched expectations,” Steadiness mentioned. “The response to our preliminary March launch was so sturdy we accelerated the worldwide rollout forward of schedule as a result of it’s clear individuals need this… properly, proper now.”
Grindr shouldn’t be the primary app of its form 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 put up sexually specific photographs on their public profiles, has had a characteristic just like Proper Now for a while. However Proper Now’s widespread launch is the declaration 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 International Gayborhood in Your Pocket™.”
Beforehand, Grindr launched A-Record, a instrument that makes use of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 mannequin and Amazon Internet 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 solutions about locations which may make for good dates. A few of Grindr’s AI options are free to strive, 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 herald 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 p.c following its SPAC, and the corporate has been scrambling to ascertain new income streams amid worker unionization efforts and inside considerations that Grindr “was shedding 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 need for the corporate to begin fascinated by how the expertise may 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 mentioned. “Should you’re going to do advertising for this, nice; begin considering with AI first after which go to individuals as a result of that’s how I feel firms are going to be constructed shifting ahead and that’s what we must be doing as a enterprise as properly.”