Facebook Wants To Help You In Finding Your Love
At Facebook’s f8 developer conference yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an upcoming online dating feature.¬†The feature¬†will compete with dating websites and apps such as Match Group-owned Tinder and OkCupid, according to a Reuters¬†report.
Dating preferences, things in common, and mutual friends will be used to suggest potential matches. Activity within the dating feature will not be shared with a user’s Facebook friends, the company said in a¬†statement.
The service is ripe for matchmaking, given that 200 million people on Facebook list themselves as singles, CEO said. However, “this is going to be built around long-term relationships, not hook-ups,” he insisted.
Zuckerberg said he once met a couple who met over Facebook. But “the reality is today we haven’t built any feature to help people find a partner.”
Zuckerberg previewed a few screenshots of the feature, which will let you create a dating profile and meet singles outside of your friends:-                          
                 
On Facebook’s dating service, people will be able to browse events and groups related to their interests, such as upcoming concerts or groups for runners. If a user sees an event they’d like to attend, they will be able to “unlock” that event to interact with others attending it.
From there, their dating profile will be shared with other people going to the event who are also using the dating service. They will be able to browse through those users and start a conversation in a private messaging inbox that isn’t connected to the Messenger or WhatsApp apps.
Beyond creating new competition for popular dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble, Facebook’s move will pose a test for them because they have largely come to rely on asking their users to login with Facebook credentials. This grants the apps access to select Facebook data, which helps to speed up the process of creating dating profiles.
