Meet Matchmallows, the Middle East's Decidedly Smarter Answer to Tinder

Promising the best traits of both Tinder and Match.com, Matchmallows places personality first and appearances second.

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Complex Original

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Thirst is international. With Twitterofficially lifting its 140-character limit from the bowels of direct messaging earlier this week, the wild west of digital interaction is encountering fewer and fewer boundaries all across the world. Speaking of Twitter, the definitely-not-a-hookup-app PR team at Tinder pulled quite the blitz on mainstream media with their supposed rant of tweets lambasting Vanity Fair. The publicity stunt was, you know, so American and kind of a bore. So, what does the rest of the world have to offer in the way of Tinder-like roulettes?

Well, the Middle East has Matchmallows, which bills itself as the digital convergence point of "the math and intelligence of Match.com and the fun of Tinder." Developed by Caline Nahhas, Andy Tarabay, and Jad Arida, Matchmallows sheds the decidedly American concept of public-everything and replaces it with a more versatile idea of intimacy. "The main purpose of launching Matchmallows was the trending apps today are all related to appearance, it’s all about pictures,” Nahhas tells the Daily Dot from the Matchmallows office in Beirut. “On the other hand, people here in the MENA [i.e. Middle East and North Africa] are afraid to publish their real names and their pictures.”

To battle this aversion, photos on Matchmallows are simply an optional happenstance. Though the visual connection is still treated as an important component of online dating, personality traits take the lead in the site's matching process. "It’s how the other person thinks," says Taraby. "It’s not only about what the other person looks like." According to current figures, Matchmallows is already 20,000 downloads strong and claims to be attracting singles from "disparate pockets of the world." If you find yourself in what might be considered disparate and/or a pocket, feel free to give it a whirl.

 

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