Forget Tinder, Here Comes Metadating

Trending News: Tinder Is Dead, Long Live Metadating

Why Is This Important?

Because the number of steps you took this week could be the new ‘ has a good sense of humor.’

Long Story Short

Researchers at Newcastle University have come up with a new form of dating called metadating where the information stored by devices such as your smartphone is used to find suitable partners.

Long Story

Our smartphones, tablets and laptops probably know more about the real us than anyone else so it makes sense that they could probably do a better job of finding you a suitable partner than your (heavily fictionalized) dating profile.

Dating sites don’t usually ask for your heart rate, number of steps taken or hours slept each night — the kind of information automatically gathered by your smartphone — but researchers at Newcastle University have experimented with what would happen if they did.

On a speed dating night, couples were paired according to the data their devices would record on them and gave information on food intake, how far they’d been away from home that day, how often they called their mother and how well they’d slept.

The results will be presented at CHI 2016 in California next month but at least one couple from the experiment have formed a long-term relationship through metadating.

For this test the participants filled in a questionnaire (rather than hacking into their phones) and they then discussed their stats with prospective partners at the dating event.

The potential dates filled in a section of information called ‘My Self’ with factors like walking speed and shoe size, then they listed favorite books and films and gave information on recent habits such as distances walked. They then filled in a blank sheet with the data as they wanted it to be shown — for example one participant used their FitBit data, another chose to write "Miles Run This Week: 0" — and swapped sheets with others, in total showing their information to 28 others.

Study author Chris Elsden of Newcastle University’s Open Lab said in his paper Metadating: Exploring the Romance and Future of Personal Data: “Some explicitly chose unusual and interesting data to record, while others felt they should be more honest and accurate. However, for all participants, the hand-drawn profiles offered a new and more expressive way of sharing and talking about their data.”

The key to metadating’s appeal seems to be picking the data that you feel gives an interesting representation of your character as a ‘ticket for talk’ with a potential partner rather than boring them with a statistical breakdown of your typical Monday at work.

Elsden explains: “Our study showed that you can be creative with data, you can play around with the way you present it and use it to relate to other people. I’d like to see something like Instagram for data, where you could be playful and find new ways to design what your data says about you.”

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Is metadating more effective than Tinder?

Disrupt Your Feed: Thanks metadating, I never realized how sexy it could be to tell a date how many steps I’ve taken or when I last called my parent

Drop This Fact: More than 10 million people use Tinder daily.