It's called 'Sifjaspellsspillir'. And if you have a big family, you might just need it in your life.

By NATALIA HAWK

You know what sucks?

When you go to work, or university, or a bar, and you meet someone amazing with great hair and a fantastic smile.

You talk to this amazing person and you really get along. You think maybe… the two of you could get it on sometime.

So you go on dates, you meet each other’s parents. You talk about your hopes and dreams for the future. When the time is right, you get engaged and then married. You have kids and they’re perfect.

And then you somehow find out THAT YOU’RE RELATED.

Awkward.

That, my friends, is INCEST; one of the major taboos in society ever since the 1800s when we decided maybe marrying people we aren’t related to might be delightful?

Unfortunately, incest is a major issue in the snow-capped mountaintop land of Iceland. This is because Iceland has a population of just over 300,000 people.

To put that in perspective for you – in 2010, the population of Sydney, Australia was over 4 million. Even the city of Canberra has a bigger population (and we wouldn’t want the pollies interbreeding, would we?).

If you live in Iceland, it’s extremely likely that you are somehow related to the person who sits next to you at work. Or the person standing next to you at the bus stop.

That’s why clever Icelanders have developed a new incest app to ensure that you can know the intimate details of someone’s family tree from the get-go.

The app is called Islendigna and has a feature called “Sifjaspellsspillir” (how does one even pronounce that? Seriously people, remember that word and use it to win your next game of Scrabble) which translates to “Incest Destroyer”. Nice.

This from NBC.com:

The app draws information from the Íslendingabók database, a national record of Iceland residents and family trees dating back into the Middle Ages.

…When you tap phones with someone who has the app, it brings up an alert if the owners of the two phones share a grandparent. (Of course, if you don’t already know who you share a grandparent with, incest may be the least of your problems, but the team says it is looking into functionality for spotting common great grandparents, too.)

So. Do you think there’s a market for an Australian version? Or a worldwide version?

Personally, I would want one if I ever went, say, speed-dating in Poland. My parents are Polish and so were their parents and their parents’ parents and judging by the amount of second cousins I met last time I was there… I may just be related to the entire country.

I’m not personally worried about Australia because there be no fam-bam here. But I do legitimately know a guy who met someone at uni in Sydney and flirted with them – only to discover days later that they were second cousins.

Such awkwardness would never have happened if he’s had the Sifjaspellsspillir feature, now would it?

Then again, my colleague Rosie just told me that every single one of us are descended from the Iceman (the things you learn from Ancient History in high school!), so perhaps we should just give up and go with it?

Em & Dave spoke about this very app on Mamamia Today yesterday. Have a listen to the hilarious audio below:

What does Australia need an app for?