- Malaysian dating app Wowwwz launched a virtual river on their app in commemoration with Chap Goh Mei.
- Each orange represents a member of the opposite sex, and tapping on an orange will reveal their picture and profile.
Chap Goh Mei is often named as the “Chinese version” of Valentine’s Day that actually benefits single people.
According to tradition, young maidens throw oranges into a river or sea to signify that they’re ready to find a good husband, because it’s said that the end of Chinese New Year is a night of courtship. If an orange is picked up, it means that the person who threw it would be able to find a good spouse.
And some people have upgraded the custom by attaching phone numbers and Facebook URLs to the oranges.
Now there will be a virtual update to the custom, through a Malaysian app called Wowwwz.
Run by two Malaysians, their mission is to help single people in Malaysia find and build long-lasting relationships through the power of saying nice things to each other.
It’s basically Tinder but with oranges and tapping.
Each orange flowing down their virtual river is a member of the opposite sex, made up of approximately 3,000 single people on Wowwwz’s database. Tapping on an orange reveals who someone is, and users can keep tapping until they find someone interesting.
Finding out more about the person is as easy as going to their profile, and this is where the core design of the app comes in. You can look at what their friends have to say about them, and if they believe in the same things you do.
You might even see someone you know sharing something that they like about this person.
If you like them, then you can just drop them a message and see if they respond.
Johnson Khoo, founder of Wowwwz said in a press release that, “We do not want to introduce you to just any partner. Instead, we want to introduce you to someone who shares compatible values and interests as you.”
Besides trying it out yourself, Wowwwz also encourages users to bring in their single friends to increase the population of oranges floating down their river.
To anyone interested, it’s available until this Sunday night.
They’re using six degrees of separation to bring people together.
The founders believe that most couples meet through a mutual friend, so they built an app to help move this process along faster. The idea here is that by encouraging people to say nice things about each other on social media, one of your friends might see that they have a lot in common.
Therefore, social media users can help “set their friends up” with each other just by shouting about someone’s values.
Wowwwz powers the app using a graph database that helps suggest friends of friends to you based on the values you like, and what people have said about someone.
“In other words, our future wife or husband is actually our friend’s friend right now. We just have not been introduced yet,” said Johnson.
The idea for this app makes sense after explanation, but it is still a bit of a quirky twist to the usual dating app. It makes perfect sense that the minds behind this type of quirkiness came up with an orange-y introduction system that is both fun and seasonally appropriate.
Feature Image Credit: Wowwwz