A few months ago, I was somewhat unfairly dismissive of Grindr, in the context of a discussion of everything that’s rotten in the present state of gay-oriented social networking. Shortly before my post on the subject went live, Grindr updated their guidelines for acceptable information to display on profiles (which are hilarious to read anyway) to include rules like, “No underwear can be visible,” and “No text referring to genital size or sexual acts.” Not having used Grindr in the past 10 or so months, I of course wasn’t aware of this, and dismissed the app as just another place to see pictures of ten-inch-shlong-brandishing Calvin-Klein-briefs-wearing libido-driven imbeciles with absolutely noting to offer except casual sex.

That’s still largely the case — but as with all things Israeli (a friend recently informed me that Grindr was developed by an Israeli company; somehow, I’m not even remotely surprised), Grindr takes a little while to grow on you, and I can now admit that I was somewhat unreasonable in my previous knee-jerk assessment. So, armed with a new iPhone, I reinstalled Grindr when I got back to Florida earlier this month and sat back to watch the madness unfold.

Grindr still isn’t for the faint-hearted. While the pictures are, generally speaking, more work-safe than before (naked torsos abound, but there’s nary a pair of tight underwear in sight, thank god for that), the messages I’ve been receiving from other users are, generally speaking, not. There’s one gentleman in Aventura, near the Apple Store I work at, who, every day at 2:00pm for a week, sent me the message, “Would luv to suck ur toes, man.” When I failed to take him up on the offer, he varied the message slightly: yesterday, I received, “Would luv to suck ur toes and ass, man.” That makes all the difference, it seems, because I went from being casually amused to wholly disgusted, and blocked him immediately.

You’re also still likely to encounter people you know in other contexts on Grindr, which is a singularly awkward experience. One of my Genius Bar customers last week, for instance, saw me on Grindr and sent the rather delightful message, “Hi. You replaced my iPhone today. Give you head to say thanks?” (I politely declined, citing Apple’s policy on receiving gifts from customers.) I’ve also seen two coworkers and the Übersturmgruppenführer of Apple’s South Florida stores, all of whom, I’m pretty sure, subsequently blocked me from being able to see them.

Also out in force are the older gays in open relationships, looking for “friends,” “fun,” or “a third (or fourth or fifth).” While I respect a person’s right to enter into whatever configuration of relationship they’d like, the preponderance of open relationships in the gay community has always struck me as kind of bizarre. Are you really that likely to get bored of your partner, sexually, that you need to define the rules of the relationship such that you can suck some twink from the internet’s toes whenever the mood strikes you? Part of the appeal of monogamy, for me, has always been the sexual commitment; not only are you less likely to catch something that way (herein, my not-so-latent STI paranoia creeps up again), but I’ve found that someone who’s well acquainted with my sexual preferences (by writ of being the only person I’m having sex with, and vice versa) is likely to do a better job getting me off. Also, how does jealousy not become an issue? Can you really be in a committed, long-term relationship with someone if your dick is in someone else’s ass three nights a week?

Anyway, this is all to say that open relationships confuse the shit out of me and contribute to those few moments when I think gay people are just unremittingly slutty and terrible. But that’s not really Grindr’s fault; it’s just the vehicle for people who are already in open relationships to put their fucked up personal lives out in the open.

On these levels, though, Grindr is exactly as I remember it being: a little bit tacky, a little bit awkward, and unfailingly hilarious. Underneath the torsos and the overuse of the “TOP” emoji to circumvent the no-sexually-explicit-language filter, though, is an interesting bit of sociology: using Grindr for its intended purpose — meeting friends of the same sexual orientation — means accepting the premise that a gay person is more likely than average to get along with another gay person. (For the record, I don’t think that’s actually true; I find, usually, that I’m less likely to get along with another gay man, relative to a randomly selected member of the general population.)

Stated negatively, the problem becomes a little clearer: why isn’t there a Grindr-style tool for everyone, regardless of gender and sexual orientation? The popularity of Grindr suggests that some subset of people are willing to put small pieces of information about themselves out in the open, visible only to the people in their spatial vicinity. One explanation for that willingness is simple horniness; but, in my case, and in the cases of a few people I’ve spoken with, I genuinely don’t think that hooking up is always on the agenda. Some people are actually on Grindr to find friends.

As an introvert, the idea of a browsable catalog of people around me at any moment in time is extremely appealing. My problem, I’ve discovered, isn’t that I have nothing to talk about with someone once I meet him or her (I’m actually quite good at small talk, once it gets going), but rather that I have difficulty knowing how to approach people I don’t know, or even which people are worth approaching. There’s an extremely good chance that any given person sitting near me in a Starbucks will turn out to be boring. But, with a hypothetical Grindr-for-the-rest-of-us, I could learn at least a little about the people near me before expending the effort required to speak to them; that way, I can instantly filter out some significant proportion of people who, from my perspective, would be uninteresting.

The obvious rejoinder is that normal fucking people would resolve this problem by walking up to strangers, saying hello, and getting over their own little psychoses in order to make new friends. But, as a firm believer in the mantra that technology is supposed to make our lives easier, no matter how absurd the issue in question seems, I see no particular reason why giving people the ability to find interesting individuals in their general vicinities is any more absurd than, say, mobile e-mail would have been in 1992. It all reduces to a question of efficiency, and undoubtedly, the ways we meet and befriend people have almost always been inefficient. (For evidence, see the few disenfranchised children on a playground in almost any school.) Assuming that Grindr’s success doesn’t just reduce to a desire for casual sex (and that’s not an uncontroversial assumption, but it’s one I’m willing to entertain), there’s no reason why its strategy of introducing people electronically shouldn’t work more broadly.