When using a messaging app for dating purposes, people are currently faced these days with an optimisation problem: how long to wait before responding to his/her last message?
Respond after too big a delay and you risk losing their attention. Go back too soon and you look desperate.
Today’s invention is an upgrade to a dating app which asks its users to alert it when they have achieved ‘relationship success’ (however they define that).
Then, in the background, their messaging history is analysed, so that any pattern can be extracted and amalgamated with the patterns of other couples who have become an item.
This information is then used to issue alerts to people in a proto-couple, such as ‘He was last in touch via a 100 character msg two hours ago. At this stage of your relationship, you should consider responding with less than 20 characters in five minutes.’
