“There are 200 million people on Facebook who list themselves as single. So clearly there’s something to do here.” Said Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO who’s certainly concerned about your relationship status and dating life.
As Facebook has been under a lot of fire after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was necessary to find a weapon that brought them back into the game; showing they can protect the data of everyone on the popular social media platform. The announcement of the dating service by Facebook, this, couldn’t have come at a better time. Call it a sweet coincidence or a brilliantly executed move; the Facebook F8 conference announced the existence of a dating service currently being developed by Facebook being called ‘revolutionary’ in a way that it helps you find ‘true love’ rather than providing a chance to hook up with random people.
And since the most important thing on the mind of millions of these people was privacy, CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had this to say: “I know a lot of you are going to have questions about this, so I want to be clear that we have this designed with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning,”
Hence, it is clear that Facebook wishes to bounce back as the beloved social media platform it once was. A couple of questions raised from said announcement quickly surfaced and as per the update from Facebook, we can expect the following information.
How is it expected to work?
As a potential partner, you would obviously share how you look, what are your likes, dislikes, interests, passions, and all the things that make you, well, you. Although your Facebook profile has it all, it also contains information and proofs about some pretty personal and goofy side of you which you would not want to share.
Thus, Facebook will let you to create a dating profile on a platform completely different from your Facebook profile; a profile which although is connected to your Facebook profile, will not advertise it. None of your friends will be able to view this profile either.
How would you match?
Finding someone who can be your potential love-interest is a rather intricate process. To ensure you have common topics to talk about, Facebook has promised to share with you, the details and profiles of people who have similar interests as you, or are attending the similar events as you. Once you ‘match’ with these interesting people, you can start your conversation on a messaging app.
What’s this messaging app?
Well for starters, it won’t be the regular Facebook messenger, nor would it be the Whatsapp platform to talk on. Rather, Facebook would be developing an entirely new messaging platform for you to speak on. As of now, Facebook is developing this messaging platform to only share text messages because; dating world isn’t so subtle after all.
The first commercial version of this feature is expected to be released after a few months, how many? No one knows. But it can be expected to be released by the end of the year or in the beginning of the next. It is interesting to know that right after the announcement, Match.com saw some drops in their stocks of around 20%.
Would it cost a lot?
A lot of people are worried about the cost of the said feature since it sounds too good to be true. Well as of now, Facebook has shared that the feature is expected to be free of cost. Interestingly, Facebook doesn’t plan to run ads alongside the created profiles. A spokesperson also ensured that there will be no ad targeting based on user data which the company is pledging to protect henceforth.
It did upset a number of big players in the dating industry while the others trust their applications enough to not be affected by this big reveal. Tinder owner proudly said: “We don’t think Facebook will have any impact on Tinder, which is our growth engine.”
As a Chief Product Officer of the company, Chris Cox, jokingly said “One of the great ironies for me is that when a lot of us joined the very first version of the service in 2004, back when it was just a handful of college students, we were convinced that dating would be the next feature Facebook was going to add.” “We were right, just 14 years too early.”
With promising words by both the CEO and the rest of the team at Facebook, it’s only a matter of time until the truth is revealed.
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