Choosing A Mate: There’s An App For That

When you want to travel, you turn to TripAdvisor for reviews of hotels, flights, and vacation rentals. When you're looking for a new book to take poolside this summer, you read Amazon's reader reviews. When you want a romantic restaurant for a date or a good movie to see with your family, you ask the users of Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes for their advice.

It was only a matter of time before someone started asking: "Why should dating be any different?"

A new crop of apps and websites is popping up to close the gap between online dating and your favorite review sites. Why take your chances with date, when you could read the thoughts of other "users" first? Just think of all the trouble you could save!

A site called ExRated is leading the pack. ExRated's mission is to "empower singles by giving them character reviews of potential dates, and allow them to express themselves through multiple choice reviews designed to help them realize what went wrong in the past and how to make the right dating choices in the future."

ExRated users can search a date's name to see their rating, from 1 to 5 stars, and any reviews that have been posted. Becoming a member is free - all that's required is to write a review of an ex. If a review of the same person already exists, you're automatically linked as friends to the review's writer. If that's not one of the most interesting ways to build your social network out there today, I don't know what is!

Or maybe you're not interested in dishing on an ex. Maybe you're on the rebound instead, in which case you need this aptly-named site: On The Rebound. Here's how it works:

1. You choose a love interest who's single on Facebook.
2. On The Rebound analyzes their Facebook relationship history.
3. The site lets you know the perfect time to ask them out.

Or maybe you want a more social experience than statistics and a rebound rating. In that case you may be looking for Lulu - a "database of men, built by women, for women" - or its guy-centric companion app, LuluDude. Lulu users can read and write reviews of the men in their lives, which are pulled from a variety of tools, questionnaires, and fun features.

On LuluDude, men can get general feedback about where they stand compared to other men. They can find tips and insight into the mysterious world of women, or they can upload their own photos and enlist their female friends to give their ratings a boost.

There really is an app for everything.