Facebook Dating appears to be a step closer, with new screenshots revealing the on-boarding flow for the option, and hinting at how it will work.
Uncovered by Facebook code tracker Jane Manchun Mong, the screenshots show the process or creating your Facebook Dating profile, which will be built into the main platform, though not visible to anyone who’s not using the Dating tool. The system is now being tested internally at Facebook HQ, which suggests that it’s close to full release, though there are few other details available as yet.
Facebook originally announced that it would be moving into dating apps back in May at its annual developer conference.
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, the option will be aimed at “building real, long-term relationships - not just for hook-ups” (take that, Tinder).
As you can see from the onboarding flow, users will be able to create a dedicated Facebook Dating profile, through which they can list their various preferences. Interestingly, it doesn’t appear that Facebook Dating will automatically populate such options from your existing Facebook profile, which could give users more capacity to keep their private life more private, and make them feel more comfortable that their Dating and main platform presences will remain entirely separate.
In addition, TechCrunch notes that Facebook’s also considering putting a limit on how many people you can express interest in at any given time, in order prevent users from approving everyone they see. Facebook isn’t planning to add in paid subscriptions or premium Dating features at this stage, and the tool won’t be subject to ads, at least not in its initial stages.
It’s an interesting move for Facebook, slithering its tentacles into yet another element of the web as it seeks to dominate all time spent.
In many ways, it makes a lot of sense. Given Facebook’s vast data banks, the company has the capacity to facilitate highly accurate relationship matches, based on mutual interests, personality types, family history, and any number of expanded correlations they already have logged. Such measures were actually identified in a patent filed by Facebook back in 2013, which related to potential dating usage.
It’s not clear whether those elements will be utilized in this version of Facebook Dating, but it seems like an obvious choice at some stage, that Facebook will eventually look into maximizing its personality matching tools by utilizing what it knows about you, and everyone else.
That could be creepy, it could be a risk for Facebook, especially right now, amidst various other privacy and data concerns. As such, it seems unlikely that Facebook would make a big push on such capacity at this stage. But eventually, it probably will, and its match recommendations will be better than any other dating app as a result.
We’ll wait and see how users adopt the tool.