Two months ago Facebook announced that they would launch a dating feature during their F8 conference, and now we have a glimpse of what the interface will actually look like. That’s because the world’s largest social media platform has begun testing their new dating feature.
The new upcoming roll out, will not be available as a standalone app but as a special section within Facebook’s app, and the testing is currently only being carried out internally among Facebook staff.
According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the dating feature is going to be for building real, long term relationships and not just for hookups. Therefore, if you are one of those singles out there who wants to commit in a long-term relationship, this may be for you.
Facebook is internally testing Facebook Dating.
I can’t go past the signup screen because they are not activating all non-employee Dating profiles because, well, it’s “pre-launch” 😉 pic.twitter.com/VQFHUJIkuX
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 3, 2018
A mobile code researcher, Jane Manchun Wong, discovered features of the Facebook dating feature and posted various screenshots on Twitter.
This dating feature gives you full control of your privacy settings. That means you can decide if you want to share you dating profile with your mutual friends or if you’d prefer keeping it to yourself. In other words, your Facebook and dating profile could be two completely different profiles instead of one.
Besides, you do not have to worry about awkwardly bumping into you Facebook mutual friends because this feature will not match you with people in your friend list. There is also no swiping involved on this feature. Therefore, users will have to text their “potential partner” by dropping them a message on their WhatsApp or FB Messenger.
Besides that, users will be given a number of gender options when they first sign up to this feature. The options includes men, women, trans-woman, trans-man and non-binary.
A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed that the company is currently “testing the Facebook dating feature internally” but said that they do not have anything more to share at the moment.
For a company who knows basically every detail about it users — from their interest to the people they socialize with — this “next step” is perhaps not that surprising. While it remains to be seen if this feature will ever actually launch to the public, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Would you trust Facebook to be your matchmaker?
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