Bang With Friends, the service for lusty Facebook users, is going mobile. It raised $1 million this week to help you get more friends with benefits. The influx of cash will be focused on helping you see, from the comfort of your phone, just which friends you might want to hook up with.
The site's co-founder, who goes by C, revealed a little in an email exchange with Mashable, but still kept answers as murky as usual.
"We'll be expanding BWF to enable even more honest offline meetings, helping our users break the ice and find more awesome opportunities," he said before revealing a true nugget. "We're taking it mobile soon, too."
C says the inspiration for the service was "looking at the frustration people have with other dating sites and getting tired of the dishonesty. That, and a decent amount of booze."
At least he's honest. For Bang virgins, here's what you need to know: After signing in with Facebook, the service offers anonymous scanning and selection of friends you'd like to get to know in their birthday suits. And if your matches select you as well, Bang With Friends will email both of you and let you know it's on.
Founded in January by some shy founders, the service is nearing 1 million users and about 200,000 matches. About 70% of the users are between the age of 18 and 34.
What's become window shopping-dating is a hard nut to crack, and love it or hate it, Bang With Friends is a novel digital way to break the ice. But detractors call it a privacy disaster waiting to happen, with questions of data storage, semi-public online sexual behavior and personal data identification. Plus there's also a potential PR fail in the making, should the service fall victim to the pitfalls of tools like Skout, the geo-social dating app that adults used to contact and hook up with minors. If and when that (or something worse) happens, the general public is likely to be up in arms.
There's also competition from services like Snapchat, the photo-message sharing service perfect for sending an Anthony Weiner-like message. With Facebook reportedly working on a similar service, it's very possible that beyond taking it mobile, Bang With Friends' venture capital could help it expand to this image-message space, an increasingly popular means for flirtation.
Spencer Chen, senior director of business development at Appcelerator, says he's not sure about adoption and use by young people — or at least his friends, who he says are instead experimenting with Tinder and Let's Date. Plus he's heard nothing regarding funding or growth since the service's launch before SXSW. Still, he managed to correctly read Bang With Friends' cards and thinks that based on the success of Tinder, Let's Date and Snapchat, BWF will build out its mobile offering to "exploit these serendipitous hookups leveraging mobile, social and location."
Despite a relatively crowded market, there's likely room for one more service, Chen says. "Dating is still a massive market, revenue-wise."
Would you use the app? Let us know in the comments below.
Image via iStockphoto, jaroon
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