{"id":7717,"date":"2017-07-27T20:49:14","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T20:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/patook-wants-to-be-tinder-for-platonic-friendships.html"},"modified":"2017-07-27T20:49:14","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T20:49:14","slug":"patook-wants-to-be-tinder-for-platonic-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/patook-wants-to-be-tinder-for-platonic-friendships.html","title":{"rendered":"Patook wants to be Tinder for platonic friendships"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

Technology isn\u2019t necessarily the best solution for forging new real life connections, whatever the collective marketing spiel of the web\u2019s social giants likes to claim.<\/p>\n

An especially tricky type of human connection for an app to \u2018fix\u2019 is making new friends, as friendships are often forged in the fire of random real life experience. And while there\u2019s no shortage of out-and-out dating apps, offering ample opportunities for hook ups with individual\/s from your sex of choice, what if you just want to make new friends to hang with platonically?<\/p>\n

Patook<\/a> is an app that\u2019s been around for a little while (the beta launched in mid 2016) which is attempting to crack this tricky feat of remotely sparking friendships. It bills itself as the \u201cstrictly platonic friend making app\u201d.<\/p>\n

Its bootstrapping team officially launched it out of beta this month, and it has around 70,000 users at this stage, who founder Tony Daher says are sending around 15k messages per day.<\/p>\n

Somewhat ironically, Patook recycles the Tinder \u2018swipe to like\u2019 mechanism as one of the options for screening potential friend matches, although you can also switch to a list view \u2014 arguably a better fit for a friend-finding scenario where making snap judgements on whether someone is potential friendship material just from a short online profile seems even less sane than doing so in a dating context.<\/p>\n

Before you get to that bit, the app has a fairly customizable filter interface which allows you to spec out some basics for finding potential buddies \u2014 offering the ability to select gender; whether you want to friend couples; specify an age range; and set how far from your location to search.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a profile with various likes\/dislikes fields that can be filled in, and users can also take a questionnaire to further flesh out what the app knows about them so it can better tailor matches.<\/p>\n

If you take the (optional) questionnaire the app will use your responses to hone its core matching rules, so it might, for example, promote matches with people who have kids, or who hold liberal views, or who don\u2019t smoke, and so on.<\/p>\n

Patook\u2019s flagship tech trick is one that aims to underscore its friends-only mission: it\u2019s using Natural Language Processing to help power a \u201cflirt detection feature\u201d aimed at preventing users from straying over the platonic line and trying to hit on others by sending suggestive messages.<\/p>\n

Now you might think just calling your app a \u201cstrictly platonic friend making app\u201d is enough to prevent people getting the wrong idea. But Daher isn\u2019t so sure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been some attempts in the past to create friend-making apps but they\u2019ve turned into dating apps after short periods,\u201d he writes in an online explainer<\/a>. \u201cThe premise of Patook is based on eradicating that problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything that is even a hint more than strictly platonic is immediately banned. No romantic advances, no flirting\/hitting on, no innuendos, no \u201cfriends first then we\u2019ll see\u201d behaviors\u2026 Over 5% of users who tried to join were banned before their first message was even delivered.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point it seems worth noting that dating app behemoth Tinder does itself have \u2014 what\u2019s billed as \u2014 a \u201cfriend-finding\u201d feature, called Tinder Social<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, on closer inspection, the actual use-case for Tinder Social is probably charitably described as \u2018group dating\u2019. (Vice\u2019s<\/a> conclusion after using it for a month? \u201cIt\u2019s definitely for gangbangs\u201d. So, er, still \u2018dating\u2019 then.)<\/p>\n

So, well, you can see the problem with using services that are overarchingly known<\/em>\u00a0for dating and\/or hook ups for anyone who genuinely just wants to find new friends.<\/p>\n

And, if you\u2019re in a relationship, just having the Tinder app on your phone can be a conversation starter of the wrong kind with your S.O.<\/p>\n

The long and short of all this is, anyone who\u2019s interested in meeting new people for actual coffee and genuine chit-chat probably doesn\u2019t want to do so within the wrapper of a dating app.<\/p>\n

Daher says Patook built its flirt-detecting, messaging parsing algorithm by training it on sentences considered flirty (some culled from Reddit) and others considered normal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was done by crawling some image submissions from various sites, and running them through Optical Character Recognition,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you go to say reddit.com\/r\/niceguys<\/a> or reddit.com\/r\/creepypms<\/a> you\u2019ll see a bunch of \u2018bad\u2019 examples posted as images. We picked some of them up and translated them to text.\u201d<\/p>\n

The app also performs ongoing behavior analysis to further weed out any creeps \u2014 such as looking at the kind of people a user is messaging; whether they are sending pictures only; whether they\u2019re repeat sending the same message etc etc.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the above is put into a Bayes probability classifier that keeps a working probability of a user being there to flirt,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

TechCrunch downloaded the app to test it out, and after about a week of (fairly light) usage I can safely say I have received no unwanted advances, neither in photo nor text form. Indeed, I\u2019ve not received any likes or messages at all (I\u2019m not counting the message from the app admin who noticed I was a journalist and wanted to see if he could encourage me to write about the app); and just four visits in total to my profile.<\/p>\n

And so we come to what looks to be the main problem for Patook: convincing its \u2014 likely \u2014 typically shy target demographic to really put itself out there and actively solicit attention from strangers within such a blatant \u201cfriend-making\u201d context.<\/p>\n

Asked what barriers he sees to people using the app to make new friends (over and above the creep factor it\u2019s actively working to mitigate),\u00a0Daher agrees there are a \u201cbunch of problems\u201d \u2014 including people not yet being comfortable with the concept of a friend-making app and the fact that, therefore, \u201cvery few people talk about it\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is reminiscent of online dating a decade ago where it was nearly taboo to be on such an app. I believe the tide is turning and people will change there,\u201d he suggests.<\/p>\n

In terms of specific steps Patook is taking to try to warm things up and get users chatting and virtually bonding, he says they\u2019re dabbling in gamification for starting conversations.<\/p>\n

The app also rewards users who maintain long conversations with people they\u2019re interested in \u2014 to try to get around the problem of people \u201cdropping out\u201d of conversations.<\/p>\n

Although, in my view, Patook\u2019s points-structure also works as a disincentive, by requiring users earn and spend usage points to do things like boost their profile or to view all visitors who\u2019ve liked them.\u00a0Point being: If you\u2019re starting from a position of there not being enough users in the first place, requiring your (very small) pool of users to earn and spend points to do things like boost their visibility seems a bit pointlessly heavy-handed (even if it\u2019s intended to encourage greater usage overall).<\/p>\n

Daher agrees that lack of users generally is a big barrier for Patook. In practice this means there\u2019s unlikely to be enough relevant matches in the same city for most users to feel really compelled to start conversations. In my case I liked a few other profiles but never felt an urge to proactively try and break any ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cExcept for the major hubs most cities only have a few hundred users who know of the app right now so that makes it less likely for someone to find a genuine connection other than \u2018they just live in my city\u2019,\u201d he concedes.<\/p>\n

Discussing the users it does have, Daher says the \u201cmain\u201d demographic so far are women in their twenties or thirties.\u00a0\u201cWe also have a lot of \u2018we just moved to this city\u2019 people,\u201d he adds. \u201cAnd the \u2018got married and need to find someone else who has children to hang out with\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

In terms of successful matching, he says some of the people for whom Patook works best tend to be those with \u201crather unique interests\u201d \u2014 given that the app matches rarer interests first.\u00a0\u201cSo people are happy to find someone who\u2019s also into that,\u201d as he puts it.<\/p>\n

Overall, while I like the idea, and appreciate Patook\u2019s attention to detail in building anti-creep tech, as it stands it\u2019s hard not to conclude this friend-finding platform is most likely to leave you feeling a bit, well, friendless. It doesn\u2019t take long swiping through the slender selection of profiles in your own city before you\u2019ll be reading about the interests of strangers living in other countries, and wondering what the point of the app is.<\/p>\n

If the future of work means a lot more Internet-connected remote workers who aren\u2019t regularly sharing a physical office space and thus not benefiting from easy access to a workplace social circle, there arguably is<\/em> going to be a need to find alternative ways for people to forge new friendships. I\u2019m just not sure another app is the best answer to that, however honorable its intentions are.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/3XBl6mY1nh4\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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