I’ve got this friend who lives in Shenzhen.  We often meet at a Starbucks in Nam Shan, where you can sit outside and enjoy the view.  He’s got this app on his phone that lets him know what “available” women are in the vicinity.  It’s sort of like a dating version of Foursquare – it uses GPS to get your location and then shows you other registered users within X meters from where you’re sitting.  The app has “worked” for him many times, or so he tells me.

Then I came across this article last week in the SCMP, “Teenage dating app shut down.”

Skout, a smartphone dating app popular with Hongkongers, has shut down its version for teenagers after a series of rape allegations in the United States involving adults posing as adolescents on the network.

I’m not sure if this is the app he’s using – it could be this or it might be something similar.  Anyway, I figured I’d take a look at Skout on the iOS app store.  (No, I’m not looking and I’m not planning to put this on my phone, just curious.)  The current version has 16,446 ratings out of which 11,259 are 5 star.

Some of the reviews are wonderful.

Czz7215 gives it three stars because, “the girls are so weird, they put up sexy pic of them selfs and get offended if you say there have a nice butt or boobs.”

Daniel john pike gives it a full five stars.  ”This app is where I met my ex girlfriend.”  Glad it didn’t work out, Daniel.

A review from someone who calls himself Capt’N Jake Sparrow.  What a clever handle.  ”I’m chat’N like its my job, I haven’t met anybody off here yet. I’m about to ‘do work’ though.”

Quinnsoreal goes into detail. “I love the flurv app but the skout app and boyahoy app have some huge glitches and you should let shirtless pics for boys be acceptable that’s why they work out to show our bodies to girls. Im sorry to admit this but if that doesn’t change so many young boys will leave and you’ll be stuck with old pervs with teen girls on that app. Your friend – Sophia.”  Sounds kind of like Wanchai, no?

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By the way, isn’t the SCMP just about the most annoying web site in the world?  I tagged this article in my RSS reader.  The article is all of 8 days old, so when I went back to hit and hit the link, I get an Apache Tomcat 404 error page.  Nice.  So then I go to the SCMP web site and type the article headline into the Search box and hit Search and … I’m taken to a page with a search form where I can fill in the information all over again.  So then I do that and hit Search (again) and get a list of possible matches.  But I can’t just click on the article I want – presumably that would be too easy. I have to check a little box next to the article and then click on Get Selected Articles.  You’d think at that point I’d get that selected article, wouldn’t you?  But noooooo …. now they ask me to log in, even though I was already logged into the site before I hit the Search button the first time.