8 New Internet Sex Fads

Getty Images From an iPhone app that measures and scores your sexual prowess to a website that's tracking where, when and how the entire world is getting laid, internet sexcessories are getting stranger by the day.

In a simpler time, the Internet's sexual potential ended at porn and online dating. Today's Internet, both more labyrinthian and better organized, offers a far greater wealth of dirty tricks. Squeaky-clean companies like Apple have watched their most sophisticated technologies become appropriated as sex toys. Dating sites offer services that would make a porn star blush. And porn stars themselves are now not only available to look at, but to "touch"—all you need is a broadband connection and an easy-to-order device that arrives in an inconspicuous cardboard box.

Following a highly amusing weekend trolling for what's new in online smut, The Daily Beast's Rachel Kramer Bussel presents eight of the Internet's best new sex Web sites, apps, and downloads.

Passion

Leave it to Apple to quantify “good in bed.” An app called Passion, released in July, uses “all of the iPhone’s distinct features such as the microphone, accelerometer, and many others to determine an accurate score” for your sexual prowess. The triple-tiered rating system measures duration (how long you can last), activity level (how much you're “into it,” using the accelerometer), and the intensity of orgasm (decibel-wise). Then it graphs your official score, which you can later compare to others’ scores around the world. I tested out Passion with my boyfriend. Our "activity level" was high enough that we accidentally turned off the Passion app (note to self: buy iPhone armband) and because of this, scored only a 1.8. (I would have given us a 9.)

I Just Made Love

With just shy of 60,000 entries, this site lets you record each of your individual sexploits like a notch on a virtual bedpost. A map of the earth on the homepage tracks where each entry is coming from so you can see where, when, and how other people are getting off all over the world. The map even has a filter option that allows you to view, say, just lesbians, or couples who recently did it outdoors, providing a fascinating, almost anthropological real-time survey of global sex patterns. As of this writing, a gay male couple had just made love in Greenland, the Spaniards were using condoms the most often, Portugal was having the most sex per capita, and someone named Foi Otimo was getting laid on a miniscule South Atlantic island called Edinburgh.

Beautiful People

Dipping its toes in the shallow end of human sexuality, Beautiful People is a dating site that weeds out the hideous, the weird-looking, and the jarringly asymmetrical. “Do looks matter to you?” the site asks. “Do you want to guarantee your dates will always be beautiful?” The site’s selection process keeps out the ugly among us (though ugly folk are still allowed to browse) by only allowing applicants to create a profile once they’ve been “voted in by existing members of the opposite sex.”

Grindr

An insta-hookup device to make George Orwell proud, the Grindr iPhone app tracks your movements via GPS and shows you pics of people in your immediate vicinity who are looking for a booty call that very minute. See a picture you like, and you can instant message that person to ask if they want to hook up. Playing to stereotype, Grindr is made specifically for gay and bisexual men, and markets itself as completely anonymous with no registered accounts or electronic trails left behind—no fuss, no names, and no second “dates."