It has been dubbed “Tinder for girlfriends”.  An app has been launched with the aim of connecting women looking for friendship.

The Huffington Post has reported that, Hey! VINA was launched in San Francisco late last month, and will be launched in New York in coming weeks.

The app’s creators, Olivia June Poole and Jen Aprahamian, state on their blog that they created Hey! VINA because “the needs of women were frequently afterthoughts in today’s technology products”.

“We’re on a mission to connect, empower and celebrate women around the world through technology,” they wrote.

Released preview images of Hey! VINA have shown a similar interface to Tinder, with a few major differences.  Hey! VINA makes users take a short quiz to help match them with compatible friends. Sample questions include whether the user would prefer to meet up for a wine, a coffee or both.

A “Ditto” notification is used to alert women when they have a match.

The creators said they encourage the friend “matches” to meet up as soon as possible.

“The whole point of the game is to be friends in real life,” they wrote on their website.

Professor Jean Burgess, director of the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre, said the idea of using new technology to make friends was nothing new.

“Before digital culture, you could think about technologies like magazines [in the past] where you could find a pen pal,” she said.  “In a sense, [using an app] is a highly accelerated version of that, just like mobile dating and hook-up apps are a new, accelerated version of classifieds and dating agencies.”

“Social media and social apps are just a really ordinary part of our social lives — there’s not anything weird or antisocial about it,” she said.