I’m an app addict due to my freelance gig as a reviewer for Arcade Sushi, but as far as apps adding any extra social dimension to my life, that experience remains at ground zero. TrulySocial founder and creative director Sebastian Coman is attempting to turn our universal app love into a socially interactive experience.
Flirt Planet Meet went live this month and is a free download at the App Store, and even if you don’t find “the one” from this free to play experience, hopefully you’ll develop a few flirting skills in the process.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I talked to Sebastian Coman about what Flirt Planet Meet has to offer the more inquisitive and adventurous soul.
How do you see apps aiding in the digital dating process?
Well, you carry your apps on your mobile phones and your tablets, which have now become your main devices with connecting to people and to the web. We have to have a presence on these platforms. Imagine you found someone on an online dating site and you didn’t exchange phone numbers and you arranged to meet somewhere and someone’s running late and you’re not able to connect to one another to do the logistics properly on the day or on the minute.We need mobile phones and tablets when we want to engage in proper, true digital dating.
The other point is everybody now has a smart phone, everybody in quotation marks (that is). People use tablets specifically during the evenings, at home, on their sofa or in bed. And they browse. They kill time. They want to get tremendous value from free apps. So when it comes to digital dating, when you’re at home you browse through files, or talk to people on your phone or on your tablet. That’s what you need to be doing instead of sitting down at your desk, opening up your browser and having a mediocre experience.
Can you talk about Flirt Juice in relation to Flirt Planet Meet?
In Flirt Planet Meet, you get 100 free Flirt Juice per day. Every 24 hours that balance is fully replenished and you use that flirt juice to send connection requests. So instead of, as it has been the case with traditional dating apps, when you just message someone freely (it) causes a lot of spam and unsolicited suitors filling up your inbox with sometimes rude messages.
Flirt Juice allows you to send friend requests in a Facebook style. But you can only send (a certain amount) per day. If you like to connect to a high quality user, we charge you more flirt juice. We’re creating a marketplace that makes it fair for the user.
What occurs when some of the Flirt Planet Meet participants use the app to irritate fellow users?
So if somebody tends to be quite forward or rude to people or hasn’t bothered filling out his profile properly, or has a profile of his cat as his profile photo, that would be a low quality profile user. We as the intermediary, we’re not going to charge as much for you to connect to that user. If somebody has been on there for months and engages with users nicely and all her peers have reviewed her in a Yelp style review system, which is one to five stars, and you review their interactions, then that user should be more costly to connect to that user. And I, as the intermediary, want to protect that user. If somebody’s just out to connect with tons of users and sending rude messages, well you can’t really do that since each connection request costs you lots more flirt juice.
One big avenue that Flirt Planet Meet is going down is the full gamification of digital dating. I very much disagree with the subscription model as a whole, as a revenue model, no matter industry. There are still so many existing online dating sites that are stuck with the subscription model. We’re giving the users a fully free experience, but if you’re a power user, then you can choose from various preview features that you can buy.
To check out the promo video for Flirt Planet Meet, click on the video below:
Some of the features coming soon for the app will be the ability to hide your Flirt Planet Meet activities from your Facebook friends as well as the ability to know when your various messages have been sent to your fellow flirt mates. “What Flirt Planet Meet is about is proving that bringing video game design into a different industry works. LinkedIn did it, Facebook did it, Twitter did it, and no one in digital dating has attempted to do this properly yet.”
