Facebook is launching a Tinder killer to help people find dates
Here’s what we know about Facebook’s new dating-service features
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is joining the dating game, trying to help its users build perhaps “the most meaningful relationship of all”.
Zuckerberg made the announcement on Tuesday during his keynote speech at F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, where the executive team unveils what the company has been working on for the past year.
It turns out that one of those things is designed to compete with dating apps Tinder and Hinge. Zuckerberg emphasised that Facebook’s intent is to help users find long-term relationships and “not just hookups”.
It’s unclear how developers could control that aspect of the features, but the CEO acknowledged potential security concerns, saying: “I want to be clear that we have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning.”
Facebook's chief product officer, Chris Cox, said that the idea stemmed from couples who had told Zuckerberg that meeting their partner was the most important thing that had happened to them on Facebook.
The goal, he said, was to make a product that would let more couples do the same “in a way that was opt-in, in a way that was safe, and in a way that took advantage of the unique properties of the platform and didn’t get in the way of everyone who wasn’t interested in dating”.
Here’s what we know about Facebook’s new dating-service features.
1. The features will be available in the Facebook app, via an icon in the upper right of the screen that will take users to a portal called “Dating Home”.