This ‘best new app’ is trying to expedite the dating process

‘Dine’ wants to help users cut down on superfluous messaging

Another new dating app has emerged called Dine, designed to get users on dates as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“A charming text conversation, especially with a complete stranger, is not necessarily a perfect indicator of whether you’ll be compatible,” according to an article in VentureBeat. “That’s why Dine tries to get you in the same room.”

Also according to VentureBeat:

After filling out a profile, you pick three restaurants or bars (there’s Yelp integration) where you’d like to go on a date. Dine then shows you two to five people a day, and which place they chose, and you can request to go on a date with that person at that particular place.

Once you send someone a date request and they accept, a chat box opens so you can get some sense of whether you have any chemistry. But having the restaurant or bar right there at the start makes the situation feel much less nebulous than chatting on Tinder.

[One of the founders of the app, Keisuke] Kamijo gives a rough estimate that about half of accepted requests lead to actual dates within two weeks, based on data from the beta testing Dine did in Vancouver. Now Dine has launched to all of the U.S. and Canada (though you’ll have better luck where there is higher population density).

This app sounds a lot like the “Blind Date” feature OkCupid introduced a few years ago (which did not prove to be particularly successful).

VentureBeat criticized the Blind Dating function back in 2013:

“It’s a nice idea in theory, but when OkCupid introduced a similar blind dating service in 2007, it was a complete bomb,” the site wrote in 2013. “People weren’t all that comfortable meeting a complete stranger from the Internet with only a name, age, and scrambled photograph to go on.

“I’m not surprised it failed. There is something both terrifying and awkward about going on a date with a mysterious stranger.”

The Dine app works differently, but we’ll see how receptive people are this time around to an app that tries to expedite the process of getting on a first date.