As an “invisible minority,” gay people rely on technology to identify and meet each other. As they become increasingly accepted into mainstream society, fewer gay-only places exist. Distinc.tt is a location-social network that helps gay people find places of interest in their city and allowing them to connect with other gay people at those places. We've built a recommendation engine that uses internal and external data to identify and rank any of the 15 million places in foursquare's database based on the propensity of gay people to be at those venues at a given time and day. Instead of showing a compiled directory of gay bars, distinc.tt helps uncover the "gay gems" in a city -- a coffee shop that isn't explicitly gay, but where every gay college student goes to study, or the gym where gay people feel the most comfortable exercising.
Because everything adapts in real time to the usage patterns of our users, this can eventually be expanded to any community and will quickly mold to those users without manual intervention on our part. We've also integrated a game and points into the application that rewards "good" behavior (like going to a fundraiser, exercising, responding to messages, etc.) and keeps people excited about using the app.
Coding with Titanium allowed us to re-use 80% of our codebase and release an Android version in 3 weeks. Moving forward, every new feature we integrate (for example, foursquare/facebook integration, new ui, etc.) is almost instantly applicable to both platforms.
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