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A new iPhone app called Singlesquare builds a location-based dating service on top of Foursquare’s check-in technology. Brian Callery, Co-Founder of single SingleSquare says the app is based around ‘sightings’ of single people in public venues, like bars and clubs. You can post a sighting of someone else, or add yourself to a specific location as a single person looking for love or a makeout session and add photos.

I love the idea but am totally cool on the initial execution of what could be a fantastic mobile geo-locative dating application.

I personally have a problem with the idea of someone else being able to post to the app that I am in a specific location at a certain time. Maybe this is avoidable, but given a quick run through the app, I’m not seeing it. Where I am is my personal business, I hope others can’t see me when I don’t want to be seen. The user interface and some of the features are a bit rough around the edges, but overall, it works and didn’t crash my iPhone, which is saying something.

Loading my friends list from Foursquare takes a long time, and the invite process isn’t great, I can’t tell who I invited already and the canned email messages are written by a four year old.

Not sure if I can “friend” new people on foursquare in the app, or only flirt with existing friends. If I can’t figure that out in the app in 10 seconds, it quickly becomes one of the 25% of mobile apps that gets used once and forgotten about.

Users of the free app can browse a list of nearby venues to see how many single people are there — or rather how many single people using Singlesquare are there. Once you find someone you can send them messages — ‘pickup lines’ as they’re known in this app — and then take things from there.

And where are the canned flirts or pickup lines?  They should be sponsored flirts brought to you by alcohol companies, local venues, etc. This is mobile monetization strategy 101 stuff folks.

The success of all these standalone dating apps is based on the premise that the more people using them, the more people in a general area will pop up on a specific service. The problem is that these mobile apps seem better suited to large dating sites as a feature, not the usual scrappy startups without the marketing resources to thoroughly penetrate multiple geographic areas enough to reach critical mass.

Basing the value of the app on the notion that exchanging messages in advance of meeting will avoid wasting time with inapropriate matches is a stretch, given that people email all the time on dating sites and still usually walk away from first dates going wtf?

I’m looking forward to doing a full review of SingleSquare version 2 once the kinks are worked out.

Article goes on to mention StreetSpark, MeetMoi and Skout. Read more at CNET.