In the 2010 film The Social Network, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher memorialized the creation of Facebook as an anti-romantic outburst by a forlorn Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. The result of this bitter sophomore’s night of drunken coding: a website on which students could rate each other’s profile photos.

Nearly a decade after that scene’s setting, Facebook is, well, Facebook, complete with a library of applications that mine its data pools for all sorts of purposes. Some fun, some nefarious, and some that seek to extend the social experience. Two D.C.-based developers, Bennett Richardson and Justin McLeod, are trying to do that last thing with Hinge, an app in which users rate their Facebook friends’ contacts on attractiveness in hopes of setting up real-life encounters.

“We wanted to figure out a way people could meet dates through their existing social networks,” Richardson said at the app’s launch party last week. “It’s all about mutual interest.”

Hinge, which Richardson said was first scratched on a cocktail napkin two years ago, is being developed out of the newly opened startup “accelerator” 1776, 1133 15th Street NW, which launched last week. It was previously located at Fortify.vc’s startup facility, The Fort, where a beta version was offered in 2012.

The app’s algorithm uses interests, photos, group memberships, and other data Facebook users offer to calculate ideal matches. From there, the program delivers a user a list of people in order of shared interests, and it is then up to the user to “rate” that person with between one and five stars. Some information—including a person’s photograph—stays hidden unless two users give each other four or five stars, in which case the digital curtain is dropped and contact information can be exchanged.

But can a couple of guys build a dating app that satisfies both men and women? Richardson said the app is built to be more shielding of female users, and that “every single one of our features is girl-approved.” (The approval, he said, came from female members of Hinge’s front-end team.)

The point, Richardson said, is to move Facebook circles—which are designed to be built on real-life acquaintances—into more intimate settings. And unlike big dating sites like Match or OKCupid, Hinge uses information already entered into a social networking site, rather than demand users create brand-new profiles and answer series of probing questions.

“We’re just trying to be a different way to connect,” Richardson said. “These tools are useless if you just end up chatting with people for weeks and weeks.”

Richardson and McLeod, who attended Colgate University together, say D.C. is an ideal place to launch an online dating platform. “People are transient,” Richardson says, which he adds makes Hinge more appealing than big dating sites like Match.

Hinge is available as a free download from Apple’s iTunes Store for iPhones. Its creators said an Android version is still in development.