LONDON — It might sound like an odd thing to say, but for too long there's been a hairy, dog-shaped hole in the world of online dating. There are plenty of places to go if you're feeling lonely and want to meet people, but what if it's your dog that's feeling lonely? What if Rover wants to make some new dog buddies to chase sticks in the park with, or Fido wants to find that special someone with whom he can share long, tail-wagging beachside walks?
Well luckily this is the Internet, and if there's enough demand for something (or, let's face it, even if there's absolutely no demand at all), someone will eventually invent it.
Enter Tindog, an app that lets you "Find other dogs & their owners around you" in the swipe left/right style made famous by Tinder (the boring human version).
But first things first. If you're going on the hunt for doggy friends, you will of course need a dog.
Introducing, Edie, a 10-year-old Spaniel/Jack Russell cross in search of a new friend:
Edie wasn't sure about Tindog at first, but we eventually persuaded her to give it a go.
First, we had to sign up.
The app asks for your dog's age, sex, and breed – we hit an initial snag when we tried to enter "Spaniel/Jack Russell cross" and were told it wasn't a valid breed, but we settled for "Mongrel" in the end and although Edie was a bit miffed she cheered up when it was time to choose a profile picture.
We wanted to show off Edie's fun side, so after some deliberation we settled on this:
After that it was time to find some new friends. Tindog works in a similar way to its human inspiration; you're shown a series of "profiles" (or in this case a load of different dog photos) and you swipe left if you're not interested and right if you like what you see. You can also click a little information icon to bring up the dog's profile (their name, age, how far away they are, when they were last active, and an "About me" section). There's also some information about the owner and their picture, if they've chosen to upload this.
Here are some of the dogs we attempted to befriend:
We got a bit carried away with the swiping and had to rein ourselves in after awhile.
Of course, we didn't want to seem desperate, so we did do some left swiping too. Unfortunately none of these three made the cut (Edie isn't a fan of fancy dress which ruled out Capitaine and Izo, and Sufi was quite clearly not a dog at all).
After that, all we had to do was wait. And wait.
And wait.
After several hours and zero matches, we started to panic. Were there no dogs online on a Friday morning? Was it us? Had we gone too quirky with the photo?
In a last-ditch, desperate effort, we took to the streets. We wanted to find out if Tindog was light on active dogs, or if the dogs just weren't interested.
This is how Daisy, a Jack Russell/Chihuahua cross, reacted when we showed her Edie's profile picture:
Oh dear.
So what did we learn from using Tindog?
1. It's addictive.
A lot of Tinder's popularity seems to stem from how easy it is to use, and Tindog has definitely recreated that. There's something infinitely cheering about scrolling through dog after grinning dog, even if they don't want to match with you.
2. It's a bit hard to know what (or who) it's for.
Is Tindog just another dating site, where humans use their dogs as an icebreaker? Is it a place to meet local dog walkers? Or is it just meant as a bit of fun? The website doesn't really commit to either (finding friends for your dog and meeting fellow owners are two different options advertised), so you can probably use it for whatever you like – the only downside is you might occasionally get your wires crossed with other owners out there.
3. Rejection hurts.
It's not you Edie, it's us. We didn't choose the right photo. There will be dogs out there who want to match with you, we know there will. And anyway, it's only been a day, right? Nobody matches after only a day on these things, do they?
Do they?
Mashable has reached out to the London-based owners of tindog.co with some questions about the app, and we'll update this article if we receive a response.
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