I noticed yesterday that one of the contact management apps I’d previously flirted with, Humin, has been bought by Tinder. Tinder, if you’ve been kept in a box for the last few years, is probably the most popular dating app — and its user interface has been cited to me by many as really very good. I mean, I’ll never know. I can’t use Tinder. Not least because, seriously, why would I subject complete strangers to that? Also, I remember Hot Or Not, which is likely one of the chief foundations of what Xeni called “the culture of clicks” the other day (and that’s a thing I want to return to soon).

But, today, I’m finding the idea of a swipe-enabled dating app buying a contextual contacts app kind of interesting and curious. I mean, Tinder clearly has some clever UI people, and maybe the end result might be a really good contacts app — which is something I could still really use. (One of the contenders, Brewster, has been bought by FullContact, so that’s gone away.) That said, nobody buys a company in order to make the-same-thing-but-better Maybe a Humin-enabled Tinder will just file your dates away better. But there’s interesting notions in there - since there’s not a killer contacts app, maybe contacts need to be date-ified in the same way that everything a couple of years ago apparently needed to be gamified?

Just read: SIGNS PRECEDING THE END OF THE WORLD, Yuri Herrera (UK) (US)