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Facebook is starting to publicly test its online dating product, called Dating, in Colombia today. The service was at the F8 annual conference in May this year, and will likely be available in other places in the future. For the time being, users aged 18 and over in Colombia will be able to create dating profiles and, once they have reached critical mass, will find matches. WIRED had the opportunity to preview a first version of the service, and that sounds promising, especially for users who are looking for meaningful long-term relationships rather than connections.
In other words, you can expect to find exactly zero.
Facebook is entering the dating services market after competitors like Tinder and Bumble, but it starts with a huge advantage: most people already have Facebook accounts. And while Dating works only on mobile, there is no need to download an additional application to your phone. But in the United States at least, the youngest – and most likely to be single – say they are. It is not yet known if Dating would be enough to attract them to their parents' favorite social site.
As Facebook announced in May, users will create separate profiles only for dating service. The only information transferred is your age and your first name; You will need to manually complete the required additional information, including your verified location, gender, and the type (s) of people you are interested in. You can also specify your size, your religion, the title of your job, your place of work, your place of school and if you have children.
You can complete your profile with up to nine photos or breaking questions provided by Facebook. There are currently 20 questions to choose from: "What does the perfect day look like?" At the moment, you can not write yours.
"It's about opt-in and making sure people are really intentional.
Nathan Sharp, facebook
Once your profile is set, Facebook will use a unique algorithm to associate you with potential dates, based on factors such as commonalities and common friends. You will not see anyone you are already friends with on Facebook, nor will you see the people you have blocked. You can also report and block users with the same tools available elsewhere on the social network.
Facebook limits potential matches to people within 100 kilometers (there will be a different metric equivalent when the product is deployed in the US). Like other dating apps, you can also choose to match only people who live nearby, have children, share the same religion, or enter a slice of age or age. of specific size.
"We're trying to connect people who are open to getting to know each other in the future," says Nathan Sharp, product manager at Facebook. "It's about opt-in and making sure people are really intentional."
As part of this mentality, Facebook Dating does not have a sweeping mechanism to the right or left. To sort the potential matches, you must press "Not interested". Facebook dating users will not be able to start a conversation simply by saying "Hey". Just like the dating app, users will instead have to respond directly to any of the nine photos or questions of a potential date, like "Was this taken in Morocco? I've been there too!
Facebook dating will stay in their own inbox separately from Facebook Messenger, and you will not be able to send links, photos, or payments for security reasons. If you want to exchange photos or news items with a potential match, you must give them your phone number or switch to another email service.
But Facebook Dating can connect to other features of the platform. For example, you can choose to correspond with people who attend the same events or who are part of the same Facebook groups. To do this, you must "unlock" each event or group manually; By default, users will not be able to search for a missed connection unless the other person has chosen to be discovered.
All events and groups are a fair game. users will have the opportunity to unlock this Taylor Swift concert from 2012 and the housewarming they will attend next week. An important note: the organizers of groups and events have no control over the choice of members or participants. For example, the organizer of an Alcoholics Anonymous group or a person planning an event in a church can not disable the dating feature. "The philosophy is that if people want to go out with the world, it should not be in the hands of another person," says Sharp.
It's these kind of features that really differentiate Facebook Dating from its competitors. By using the mass of data that it already has on users, Facebook has the ability to become a powerful player in the online dating space. While many dating apps have relied on Facebook data for years (as if to show you when a potential match has common friends), they have never been able to exploit everything. This dependence can also make them vulnerable when the social giant enters their territory, which is a weakness that some companies seem to have prepared for.
In May, for example, Tinder stated that it was a new feature called Places, which allows users to correspond with people who like to be in the same place, such as bars, restaurants or clubs. The product is based on information from Foursquare, rather than Facebook. Other applications, such as those that have recently stopped using Facebook accounts, need to register.
Facebook does not seem content to just build a better Tinder. When the product was first announced in the spring, Chris Cox, director of Facebook products, pointed out that Dating is designed to foster meaningful relationships. But to do this, the company will have to truly innovate on existing dating applications, which have been criticized for creating less interesting relationships than they were.
"I would advise Facebook to make sure that [users] Joshua Pompey, who runs two companies that help people create and manage their online dating profiles. He often says that he recommends customers to use more traditional dating sites like Match and OkCupid because they allow longer profiles and tend to attract more singles interested in more relationships. serious.
In the end, all meetings on Facebook must be entertaining. Millions of users find it fun to glide and chat about dating apps, even if they do not meet their future partners. "A lot of the satisfaction comes from the use of the application and its use," says Jessica James, a lecturer at Texas State University, who has studied user behavior on applications of met. Although some Colombians may find love on Facebook Dating, the real test might be to know if they just spend a good time.
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