At the recent Ubuntu hackathon in San Francisco, two developers—one from Canonical and another from a small developer called Innocto—were teamed up to build an app for hooking up.
According to a blog post by one of its creators, it’s all about having fun without getting too serious.
“For those who don’t know us, we are both in our twenties, single, male and female.”
The idea was born after the hackathon itself when the participants were hanging around together: “We had been talking about how great it would be if there was an easy way to meet people at events like this. A few drinks later, and we had come up with the idea.
It’s not actually a dating site per se, but more of a social networking app to facilitate casual encounters. Their no strings hookup website now has thousands of members and successful hookup stories, and competes with existing apps such as Tinder. However, with this app, members report much better experiences than on other sites, where they’re often inundated with spam messages or fake profiles, or being ghosted on apps like Tinder and Bumble.
What makes this app different? It encourages open, honest communication between users. The idea is that you’ll never have to worry about “catfishing,” because you can see who you are dealing with before meeting them, and you will always be able to interact with real people and talk face-to-face.
To start off, you create a profile describing yourself, your likes and dislikes, and what kind of experience you’re looking for. There’s also a section where you can upload photos showing what you look like, which is optional. Once you’ve completed your profile, you can browse through others’ profiles, searching by location, age range, gender, sexual orientation, and a variety of other factors, such as physical appearance, education, profession, and interests.
You can also use the chat feature to get instant responses from your favorite members. If you like someone, you can “add them as a friend” to read their messages without logging in and out again. You can view their profile photo and bio, and send them a message to start a conversation. When you want to arrange a date, you can either take advantage of one of the pre-arranged dates available, or set up something unique with whomever you like best.
In order to make sure everyone has a good time, the app lets you rate your date using a scale from 1 to 5 stars. This helps people find other people they might enjoy, based on what other people liked about them, and what they didn’t. People are encouraged to be upfront about what they want, so there won’t be any surprises.
All of this is possible thanks to a combination of technologies. First, it’s built on OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that supports a lot of different programming languages and frameworks. Second, it’s built using the LAMP stack, which consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. They chose these because of their flexibility and compatibility, as well as their broad adoption. The team’s goal was to build something useful that could be used by anyone, anywhere.
They’re hoping to expand into other cities soon, and hope to add features such as integration with Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, as well as expanded search capabilities, allowing people to find other members based on additional criteria beyond location, age, and gender.