Grindr’s new Right Now feature brings a live feed to the hookup app

Grindr has at all times excelled at serving to its customers discover of us seeking to spend some high quality time collectively, however the hookup app is seeking to velocity up the “looking?” course of much more with its newest characteristic.

As we speak, Grindr introduced that Proper Now, its social media-like dwell feed characteristic, is rolling out to all the platform’s customers following a pilot test in select markets. Not like Grindr’s conventional grid that exhibits you an array of different customers’ profiles based mostly on how distant they’re, Proper Now capabilities a bit extra like X / Twitter and shows a stream of latest posts that may embody each textual content and pictures.

Proper Now posts disappear from the dwell feed after an hour, and whereas they don’t have for use for hookup functions, posters can hit a toggle specifying whether or not they’re seeking to host (learn: have somebody over for enjoyable.) At launch, Grindr says customers in sure areas “will obtain various free hour-long Proper Now classes per week (refreshed each Friday)” which means that the feed will solely be accessible in hour-long home windows. Down the road, the corporate additionally plans to make extra classes accessible to buy.

In a press release about the new feature, Grindr’s chief product officer, AJ Steadiness, defined that Proper Now was designed to assist folks “discover precisely what they need, when they need it – with out the guesswork.”

“We constructed this intention-based characteristic based mostly on suggestions from our neighborhood to allow them to join with like-minded folks with out losing time on mismatched expectations,” Steadiness mentioned. “The response to our preliminary March launch was so sturdy we accelerated the worldwide rollout forward of schedule as a result of it’s clear folks need this… effectively, proper now.”

Grindr is just not the primary app of its type to introduce performance clearly impressed by social media platforms. Sniffies, a extra cruising-focused Grindr competitor that doesn’t require signing up for an account and permits customers to put up sexually express pictures on their public profiles, has had a characteristic just like Proper Now for a while. However Proper Now’s widespread launch is the most recent part of Grindr’s larger plan to roll out a series of new features — a lot of that are powered by generative synthetic intelligence — meant to spice up income and make customers see the app as “the World Gayborhood in Your Pocket™.”

Beforehand, Grindr launched A-Listing, a instrument that makes use of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 mannequin and Amazon Net Companies’ Bedrock to summarize chats with the intention of serving to customers rekindle “significant previous connections” and pursue “high-potential matches.” Bloomberg reports the identical platform is now underpinning Grindr’s Wingman, a generative AI assistant that may draft chat responses for customers who can’t consider issues to say for themselves, provide sex tips, and provides ideas about locations that may make for good dates. A few of Grindr’s AI options are free to attempt, however for continued entry to them, the corporate requires customers to enroll in its month-to-month subscription plans.

All the options are a part of Grindr’s effort to usher in more cash and staunch the monetary bleeding that got here following its preliminary public providing in 2022. As Platformer reported last year, Grindr’s inventory worth plummeted by 70 % following its SPAC, and the corporate has been scrambling to ascertain new income streams amid worker unionization efforts and inner considerations that Grindr “was shedding its progressive tradition.”

On the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference this week, Grindr’s CEO George Arison spoke about how AI has modified his personal productiveness, and his need for the corporate to start out eager about how the know-how might be extra deeply built-in into its providers.

“For all the brand new issues that we construct, I need them to be constructed as if we’re an AI-native startup,” Arison mentioned. “In the event you’re going to do advertising for this, nice; begin considering with AI first after which go to folks as a result of that’s how I feel firms are going to be constructed shifting ahead and that’s what we needs to be doing as a enterprise as effectively.”