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GAYDAR: Grindr helps gay men with iPhones meet.

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A location-aware iPhone app is spawning a sexual revolution by providing what is effectively a meat market enabling people to meet other gay men who may be just metres away from them.

In bars, restaurants or just walking down the street, users of the Grindr application can fire it up and see a list of other gay men in their area sorted by how far away they are. They can choose to start up a chat through the app or walk over and say hi.

The app, which uses the phone's GPS to pinpoint users, has taken Australia by storm with Sydney and Melbourne placing fifth and ninth on Grindr's list of top cities. It has about 100,000 local users, making Australia the third largest Grindr community behind the US and Britain. It is available on Apple's App store in New Zealand.

"I haven't seen an app that's become so popular in the gay community as this one," said Tim Duggan, co-founder of SameSame.com.au, Australia's largest gay and lesbian online community.

"It's been quite remarkable how it's swept through the gay community and I know a lot of people whose sole reason to get an iPhone was to get Grindr on their phone."

Grindr has over 900,000 users around the world and is growing at 2500 new users a day, with its popularity skyrocketing after British TV personality Stephen Fry mentioned it on Top Gear.

Joel Simkhai, 33, who lives in Los Angeles and launched Grindr in March last year, said in a phone interview that his goal was to have the app in the pocket of every gay man in the world. It solved a key problem: knowing who else in your immediate vicinity is gay.

"I go to a party or I go to a supermarket or I go to the gym - anywhere I go I have guys I look at and I'm interested in talking to them but for whatever reason I don't," said Simkhai.

"I'm curious to know who's in the same building as me, who's in the same room, who's right around me ... this idea has been in my head and i'd argue in the head of most gay guys out there: how can I meet that person right across from me?"

Compared to regular internet dating, Simkhai said Grindr was far more immediate and facilitated more real-world connections, avoiding frustrating email ping-pong.

"A hi or a handshake certainly hasn't been made obsolete here - this is just an icebreaker," he said.

But is this really dating, or just an app for finding sex? "Certainly people have sex, that's pretty obvious, but it's just a tool, it's just a way to meet the guys around you and it's also a way to figure out who else is gay around you," said Simkhai.

But Duggan has no doubt that Grindr is largely about sex, saying Simkhai was being careful as Apple is strict about keeping the iPhone a family-friendly zone.

"It's designed with one purpose in mind and it does that really well," said Duggan.

"I would say that the founder is towing Apple's line of keeping everything G-rated. They've had huge crackdowns on profile photos - I have a couple of friends who have been banned from Grindr for saying the wrong thing in their profile or having a lewd picture."

Grindr is available on the iPhone and BlackBerry only but Simkhai said versions for other platforms like Google's Android were on the way. There is a free ad-supported version or users can opt for the premium version for NZ$4.19 a month, which comes with extra features such as push notifications and no ads.

Simkhai said a version of Grindr for straight people and lesbians would be launched most likely by the end of the year.

"We get a lot of feedback from straight men and women and lesbian women who are jealous and eager to experience the same kind of thing, so we're working hard to make sure that we have a technology here that makes sense to women," he said.

Some commentators have wondered whether Grindr could spell the end for monogamy, but Simkhai cautions against blaming technology for issues caused by people.

"At the end of the day monogamy is a choice between two individuals and whether they choose to uphold those choices or not, it seems quite weird for me to blame the technology for it," he said.

But Grindr hasn't been without growing pains - it was implicated recently in a sexual assault on a 15-year-old Canadian teen by a 53-year-old man. Simkhai said Grindr was only available to those over 18 and parents should set parental controls on their kids' phones.

He said that, like any social network, there would inevitably people who used it for "nefarious or illegal purposes", but Grindr did all it could to prevent issues and worked with law enforcement by providing location information for suspected offenders.

"If you're going to commit a crime, doing so on a location-based service is probably not the best idea," he said.

- © Fairfax NZ News