Yes, there’s an app for that, too

My story on “appnoxious” smartphone users went live today on MSNBC.com. In a nutshell, the story’s about people who’ve become so enamored by all their fancy phone applications that they’re driving everyone around them insane. Or as I put it in my reported piece:

Thanks to a wave of popular new apps, our phones are now capable of passing gas, passing judgment, and annoying our friends, family and colleagues in a much more efficient, high-tech manner. They’ve also granted us the power to instantly correct — and/or alienate — anyone around us in a matter of seconds because of Web access at our fingertips. “I was at a restaurant with friends and said something about Ralph Macchio being in a movie and pretty soon somebody’s got IMDb (the Internet Movie Database Web site) out on their phone and they’re looking it up,” says Jonathan Acuff, a 33-year-old copywriter from Alpharetta, Ga. “You can’t casually say, ‘I kind of like that guy in that movie’ anymore unless you’re sure he was in it. Now they look it up and somebody else looks it up and they’re like, ‘You’re wrong.’ ”

I didn’t include info on this in the story, but there are also a slew of new mobile phone dating apps. Speeddate.com, which offers 3-minute online speed dates using instant messaging or live video has just come out with a new free downloadable Android app (apparently there’s an iPhone app already) that allows people to speed date through their smartphone as opposed to their computer.

Other mobile dating apps include BumpChat 1.1, a new “location-aware” mobile dating and chat application for the iPhone, and Are You Interested? an iPhone application for mobile dating that ties in with the AYI? website and Facebook Connect integration. Whatever the hell that means.

Also just released (and you knew this was coming): 140love.com, a new Twitter-based dating service, where you can sign up, peruse members’ online dating profiles and see if anybody’s  140-character communication stream sets your heart “a twitter”.

If it just me or does it seem like we should all save ourselves a lot of time and trouble and just start having sex with our computers? My guess is there’s an app for that, too.