www.itsnearme.com: Are you lonesome tonight? Your mobile will get you a date: Print This

MeetMoi uses text messaging to connect people. It is a mobile dating service which updates your location when you text your location to the service and it notifies other users in your area that you are there. If they are interested, they can contact, or flirt, with you.

Internet dating services are one of the most popular and successful business on the internet. Even though I never used a dating site, I personally can attest that I know many people, including family members, that have used them and met very nice (and sometimes crummy) people on sites such as Match, eHarmony, Yahoo! Personals, JDate and others. The biggest problem with conventional dating web sites is that you need to filter through to hone in on your location. Also, those services do not have a useful mobile service, except as an extension of their website which allows access from a mobile phone, still independent of location.

MeetMoi answers these two problems. It is a mobile dating service which hooks users up by basic profiles (age, gender, interest etc.), but adds in a location and mobile phone aspect. Registered users can log into a site and see people who fit their profile by location on a map which bounces around. Profiles are just like other dating and social networking sites – picture, age, username and brief description and you can click to contact the person. So far, nothing is different about MeetMoi. Where meet MeetMoi differentiates itself is in letting users communicate, for a fee, with people who are away from a computer, nearby, and have a mobile phone.

To use MeetMoi service when away from home, at a bar or other location, you text your location, zipcode or address to 94810 and the service lets you know who is around and wants to chat, which they call flirt. Flirting on MeetMoi costs $0.99 per flirt, which is 10 text messages (differs for some carriers), or $9.99 per month for unlimited flirting. In a flirt you get texts of people who are nearby, and they are informed about you, you get their profile and you can start communicating. A demo is available online and shows the person receiving a picture to their phone of the person that is around, this is impossible to do with SMS, you receive only a text description.

MeetMoi is an easy site to navigate, but does not tell you how many users it has and when I logged in it showed me only 4 people, some of whom were 100 miles away. In an urban place like New York City, this is troubling, since in dense urban place services like this usually have the most users per square mile. User profiles were a bit limited and they were not really what I would consider an ideal match. It is also annoying to have to manually update the location, you don’t always know the address or zipcode of where you are, or remember to text it in. If you are bar hopping, then you need to remember to update your location, which gets harder after several drinks. There is also a possibility of making an entry mistake or deciding to fool the system by stating you are not where you say you are. Could you imagine someone texting you that they are at some bar, only to get their and find that they were pulling you leg.

My bottom line opinion is that MeetMoi is a nice service, but I would not use it because it costs money and i would not like to pay for a service which i don't know how many other users it has. Also, having to manually update my location can become tedious (especially if I am drinking), I want the system to automatically update via my phone's GPS.

Are you lonesome tonight? Your mobile will get you a date

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