The "Secret Crush" feature of Facebook Dating will probably be chaos

The Internet has a crush on the crush and it has been particularly strong in recent years.

There was Call me by your name and the worship of Timothée Chalamet, then To all the boys I loved before and the cult of Noah Centineo. Next are Tessa Thompson, one-woman empathy empires, and the first single "Crush Culture" by acolyte Conan Gray, one of Lord Acoly's acolytes. an adult age of endless crush, the possibility of intense attachments to several people at a time. "

It's so much fun! And now Facebook is involved.

At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, the company provided more details about its fledgling dating feature, Facebook Dating, directly integrated with the main mobile application. The most interesting development is that Facebook Dating has a "Secret Crush" feature, which allows users to list nine of their Facebook friends that they secretly crush. If you are both registered for Facebook Dating and you both identify as a secret crush, you will receive a notification. Otherwise, the crush remains secret.

If a friend you're secretly in love with is not registered to Facebook Dating, you can always list them. Facebook seems to rely on the fact that people will be so curious about who could list them as a crush to sign up for just service to see.

Facebook livestream

The idea that anyone who has nine secret crushes at the same time is, of course, very funny and also an emotional entanglement impossible to imagine. Facebook also seems to assume that most users regularly update their social circle by adding new friends to the main site and that they have not given up their professional, personal, and romantic lives on, for example, Instagram.

If I was in a hurry to select nine people from my Facebook friends with whom I could consider speaking, it would be a real challenge. Boys from my first year dorm? A former unpaid intern in a horrible magazine? The guy at the reception desk of the orthodontist? No idea where he lives now. But if you have one of those weird things that have been going on for years with high school students, I guess having told them you'd like to pamper now would be an interesting development of your story.

The feature has already been compared to the strange and failed Bang With Friends dating app (which was relaunched as Down in 2013), but it is structurally similar to Slack's equally doomed integration, built by the polyamory-centric dating app Feeld in 2017, which was supposed to have been publicly shot down as an HR nightmare.

Facebook Dating and its secret secret crush feature will not be available in the US until the end of the year. Launched with a test version in Colombia in September, it is now open to Facebook users in 19 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Thailand.

From a design point of view, it looks like Hinge's and the profiles consist of a series of photos associated with icebreaker prompts. You scroll through the profiles instead of swiping, and you can send a message to anyone without matching beforehand. However, profiles are separate from Facebook profiles and only report your first name, age and GPS-verified position. The rest you fill as you would for any other dating app. Apart from Secret Crush, Facebook removes your Facebook friends from the profiles you will see – a decisive advantage for Hinge, who regularly shows me my colleagues and the ex-boyfriends of my close friends.

Facebook is also focusing on its relevance in the real world by incorporating groups and events into its dating feature – hoping that people will agree to post their profile to users that they already risk. to meet in real life.

Until now, Facebook Dating does not contain any ads or paid features. It remains to be seen how the project could be monetized. At the Facebook Dating announcement, Product Manager Nathan Sharp told The Verge his vague reasons: "Dating is a behavior we've been seeing for a long time on Facebook. We want people to engage more easily and more easily. We just thought the time was right. "

But there is a lot of money in dating apps. Analysts estimate that the market could represent $ 12 billion a year by 2020, based on the business model developed by Match Group. Match Group, which owns Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, Hinge and more than 40 other dating-related businesses, generated $ 1.7 billion in revenue last year through advertising. to premium subscriptions and premium card features, as Tinder is supposedly popular "Super Like".

In the end, Facebook will have to make money with your crushes. All the more so as its pivot for privacy is likely to result in the loss of at least a portion of the revenues that it draws from the public news thread, and that it 's all the more important. it currently reserves $ 3 billion to give to the Federal Trade Commission in fine for repeated violations of privacy.

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