This App Works Like Tinder, Except It Helps You Make Platonic Friends.
When you are in high school and college, you make several friends almost every day. However, once you graduate, making new friends or even meeting people you might want to befriend becomes a little more difficult. Now there is an app for that. Dubbed Patook , it is a lot like Tinder, except that everyone you meet is on the market exclusively for platonic friends – flirting on the platform isn’t even allowed. It has been in beta for the past year and has become available to the general public this week.
At first glance, the idea seems crazy – except that I actually could have used it a few years ago. Six years ago, I moved from North Carolina to San Francisco. I was thirty, worked from 9 to 5, and knew exactly one person in the city: my brother’s ex-girlfriend from high school. Not exactly what you need for a great social life.
I was fortunate enough to work in a profession where I was invited to a lot of networking events, so I ended up getting to know people and making friends, but it was a difficult journey full of awkward Meetup groups and solo trips to bars. How do you even start making friends as an adult? As someone who had a huge group of friends at home, I didn’t even know where to start.
With Patook, you start by connecting your Facebook account or registering with the service with your email address.
I signed up by connecting my Facebook account which is the easiest way to be successful. From there, you will be asked to select some of your Facebook photos that appear on your profile and answer a few questions comparable to any you have ever completed on a dating profile. For example, he asks what you do for a living, what you enjoy doing the most, and what kind of people you hope to meet on the app. All questions are optional, so you don’t need to provide details that you don’t want.
After that, everything is like in Tinder. You swipe left if you don’t want to date someone, and right if you want. This someone could be a man, a woman, or even a couple. In a short time on the app, I came across quite a few married couples who had just moved to San Francisco and, like me a few years ago, were looking for new friends. When there is a match, you will be connected and can start chatting in the app. If you succeed, just like Tinder, you can set times for offline meetings.
The app’s algorithm will detect flirty messages and won’t even deliver them (and the sender might get banned), so in theory you’ll be safe when you use it, although if there’s anything the internet has taught me, I’m ‘I’m sure that someone will figure out how to achieve this. That said, if you’ve just moved to a new location, or just want to break free of your main group of friends, this can be a worthy way to find a new friend.