Facebook recently held its annual developer conference and made various announcements. For much of the conference, the social media giant defended itself against privacy concerns. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook officials went into great detail about how the company intends to restore trust among its user base. Perhaps the most surprising bit of news from the conference involves Facebook’s upcoming feature: a dating service.
Later this year, Facebook will launch a dating service on its existing platform. A concrete release date is not available at the moment. Users can expect a limited run of the service to be available for certain users within a few months. If those tests run without a hitch, then the service could be released soon after. For now, a few details are available on the upcoming service, and more information should come out soon.
According to Recode.net, the dating service will be integrated into a user’s existing Facebook account. However, a separate dating profile is used in lieu of someone’s regular profile. Users populate their profile with pictures and more information on themselves. They can see other people on the platform and send text-based messages to them. To combat certain issues, a given user can only send text messages and is limited to one message until a response is sent.
Users can find potential dates through various means on the upcoming platform. One interesting feature allows a user to “unlock” potential dates. When a person is interested in attending a local event, they’ll see other people interested in the event. At that point, they can message those individuals to find a potential date. It’s a useful feature that ensures two individuals will have at least a shared interest to start with.
For better or worse, Facebook’s announcement comes at a strange time. The company is weathering the effects of its worst privacy scandal ever. More and more people are concerned about their safety and privacy on the platform. Of course, a dating service means users give the company even more information on themselves and their habits. Facebook must convince potential users that it can be trusted with such information.
Facebook’s dating service lacks a specific name or major details right now. Then again, the company did mention user data won’t be used to target ads throughout Facebook. Such data is still valuable for the company and could be used in other ways, though. Officials for the company have promised to release more details on the service soon. It remains to be seen how much success such a service can find on the social media platform.
Dil Bole Oberoi
