Brand Marketing

Where My Pepper Spray At?

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February 3, 2011

By jbourne

For those of you who look at geo-location apps with a wary, stalker-fearing eye, I encourage you to head on over to TechCrunch and read the article on WhereTheLadies.at, a recently approved iPhone app that – you guessed it – shows users where the ladies are…at.

Metal Detector

WhereTheLadies.at uses Foursquare’s geo-location functionality to aggregate check-ins made by females – er, ladies – at nearby locations (bars, clubs, etc.).  It then ranks those locations based on the number of feminine check-ins made in the past thirty minutes.  And just in case your raging testosterone clouds your navigation abilities, the app includes a giant compass that points you in the direction of the lady-laden hotspot.

That’s right, guys.  You can now turn your iPhones into chick-finders.  (For those still holding out for the chick-magnet app, I’d guess it’s only a matter of time at this point.)

Here’s what really gets me, as a linguist: when a user who has not specified his or her gender checks in, WhereTheLadies.at will use a “dictionary crawl and permutation logic” to determine if the user is male or female.  This must be how microbiologists feel when terrorists use their formulas to make anthrax.

As I sit here and ponder what our hyper-connected world is coming to, and whether or not I should finally invest in some pepper spray and/or nunchucks, I also have to wonder, what does Austria make of the WhereTheLadies.at developers using their .AT ccTLD for their domain name?

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About jbourne