Speed dating nights and texting

About two years ago, a colleague of mine surprised me by telling me he had started running Speed Dating nights. Ever the mobile entrepreneur, I asked him how he did the matching at the end of the night. You know how this works: 20 guys and 20 girls sit down in front of each other for 2 minutes each. You mark down whether you like the other person on a piece of card…. and once you’ve completed your dates, you hang around, get sloshed or go home.

Then, over night, the organiser — that is, my colleague — sits and manually goes through 40 different cards and sorts out the matches, THEN sends out an email to each of the 40 attendees telling them who they matched. The concept being if you ticked ‘yes’ to girl number 8 and she ticked ‘yes’ to you, the organiser connects you both.

Well I thought this was the height of lunacy in terms of effort.

‘Balls to that,’ I exclaimed.

I worked out a way of doing the matching via mobile in my head and explained it to my colleague.

Here’s what you do:

1. At the start of the night, you text ‘register’ to a shortcode.
2. The server recognises your phone number and assigns you a unique user ID, e.g. ID 23. It’s this user ID that you write on your label (so that the other person can identify you).
3. You do your dates. Keep score of who you like on a piece of paper if you wish.
4. After you’ve dated everyone, you send a text message thus:

MATCH 12, 23, 24, 28, 19, 7

The numbers, of course, corresponding to the IDs of the people you liked.

5. Everyone else does the same.
6. At 9pm, once everyone has sent in their matches by text, the organiser clicks a button on a web page. The server goes through each message and works out who matches with who.
7. At 9.10pm, everyone gets a text message with their list of matches, thus:

You matched with users 4, 18, 17 – congratulations

Et Voila! Instant matching! They’re still there in the bar you see. You can now go over and talk to the matches. 😉

I built that system 2 years ago but never had the opportunity to actually put it into practice a) because I had more pressing commercial priorities and b) I never made the time to try and get a speed dating organiser to use it.

So, I write this blog post to see if anyone else has experienced something like this, or seen something like this working. I just reckon it would work really well and I’d like to hear of examples.

I haven’t ever had the balls to go speed dating myself…