This is a big deal. And not just because it will obviously cause big problems for existing dating sites, but instead because the longer-term prospects of this strategy are the beginning of an amazon-like vertical strategy for facebook.<p>Instead of being an "infrastructure" layer like they have touted to be in the past, they are now getting into verticals. So anyone building a consumer focused business that relies on a graph should be pretty paranoid about what the future may hold, just as anyone in the retail/ecommerce world is already scared of amazon. Especially if you're using facebook auth or facebook ads to drive your business: because it tells them whether you're worth coming after or not.<p>Think of the forces at play here:<p>- (1) Facebook already has an enormous, aggressive, and well funded team ready to pounce on new consumer apps that are up and coming. See Snapchat features, and the dozens of other apps that have gotten to the first tier of success only to be out gunned by facebook.<p>- (2) The rapidly shrinking facebook API landscape (and related platforms), due to the Cambridge analytics stuff and other concerns. API access is shrinking, not growing, with many platforms (like WhatsApp) with no plans to ever even have one.<p>- (3) The prevalence of facebook ads as a "first place" to learn and iterate on your business. If you think they are ignoring the rapidly scaling consumer businesses, you're wrong.<p>- (4) And now finally, their willingness to go into verticals instead of stay at the infrastructure level. They have the perfect storm to come after any consumer business with network effects at the core of its functionality.
Cue the cynics on HN, but I think this is a very natural step for FB to take and I think the product will do very very well.<p>Even if you're on a separate dating service like Tinder, you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. FB already plays a large role in dating and the signaling involved. It just makes sense for FB to own the process from start to finish when they have the ability to do it better than any existing dating app today.<p>FYI: Shares of Match Group (they are a public holdings company for many of the popular dating sites out there) plunged after FB announced this.
The elephant in the room here is that this was announced at F8 - a conference for platform developers - yet <i>this</i> platform application was developed internally and is one that, because of the neutering of the API, no outside developer could have built. They essentially said “<i>hey developers, look at this neat thing we built that you can’t!</i>”.<p>I’m curious what the point of F8 actually is at this stage. The platform has become so restricted that social apps can’t be built anymore. Facebook should just acknowledge that outside developers have outlived their usefulness now that they have helped the service attract 2 billion users, and scrap the conference.
Zuckerberg's original intention was to create a dating website for colleges. It was obvious to eyeball this intent from the pre-wall days. Your page looked like this:<p><i>I am a: [man]</i><p><i>Interested in: [women]</i><p><i>Relationship status: [single]</i><p><i>Fave quotes, fave music, about me.</i><p>Then, all that got put on hold as FB was built out in every way except that (including adding the Wall, and then the News Feed). They must have realized that FB could be something much larger than a dating network, that would get used indefinitely by its customers, without pigeonholing their primary use case.<p>I'm surprised it took this long to pull the trigger on this feature, though.
As a fierce Facebook critic, I admit that Facebook itself is a company with amazing teams and outstandingly built services.
Too bad it's also the company with the worst possible track record on privacy, who championed scientifically engineered attention grabbing as a tech tool.<p>I would sincerely like to see a paid for version of Facebook. I would easily fork out as much as I fork out for Netflix for a service that would offer me the same functions without all the profiling, with more granular control on shaping the user experience (i.e. I would rearrange my FB dashboard to focus on groups, events and messaging, while having the newsfeed as a secondary page).
As somebody who doesn't use Facebook, it's going to be damned annoying if everyone disappears off the existing dating apps and into the Facebook ecosystem. It's becoming an evolutionary disadvantage to be off Facebook.
Facebook deprecated just 4 weeks ago certain permissions from Facebook Login including relationship status, relationship details, about me, education history, work history. Tinder and Bumble for example relied heavily on those permissions in order to quickly fill the user profile with data.<p><a href="https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/facebook-api-platform-product-changes/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/faceboo...</a>
Great tactical move. FB will get:<p>- another income source from the same data. (ads and dating)<p>- even more information about their users and in a <i>justifiable</i> way. Users want them to make good matches.<p>- another costumer lock-in. It will be even more difficult to quit FB.
I get a feeling this will be pretty bad for people that don't already (or start to) use facebook regularly.<p>And I'd hate to create yet another facebook account for this. So, yeah, as shitty as the dating scene is I'd prefer a 3rd party so that I can attempt at compartmentalize my accounts.
I think it has been covered before that Facebook already has a hunch if two people seem to be interested in each other -- groups, events, messages they share, times they have visited each other profiles, and reaction counts proportional to posts after the friendship was started.<p>I think the fact that they also announced incognito mode today suggests that this dating feature could be passive. Like, if you browse Facebook normally and you are both using this feature, and Facebook sees you are both stalking each other rather much, it could break the ice for you. This is probably the better the more oblivious you are and I can see the value in this.<p>It will also be interesting to see how this feature will be rolled out. While there can be a mutual attraction between two people, I can see it being a challenge to programmatically figure out whether there exist any other reasons why the relationship could not work, e.g. logistics, and how well is Facebook able to identify such possible problems before initiating the icebreaker.
Disregarding all the recent privacy issues, I think FB is poised to become the best dating site out there. The personal data it's been collecting for all these years--the likes, shares, comments, events, groups, etc.--could be used to create fine-grained matches.
It's like Tinder. But with the potential to influence the ads you eventually see on your cable box and web browser.<p>What could possibly go wrong?
A way to get young people to use FB more? I know they literally know who's best for a user based on the ton of data we feed, but I'm wondering the privacy conscious folks would be hesitant to create a dating profile on FB.
Is no one going to point out that Facebook is <i>still</i> in the center of a public panic over privacy? Are you sure the public is going to want FB of all entities to host and run a dating service?<p>I don't get how everyone is so bullish here. I think if anything Mark should have waited a couple of months.<p>Not trying to be needlessly negative, I'm just surprised by the reaction here.
Makes sense.<p>Birth rates declining. People getting married later, and having fewer kids.<p>Western Countries facing declining population in next 25 years.<p>Existential threat to their growth at all costs model.
If anything, Facebook is late in launching this. I'm curious why they didn't buy Tinder and get into the game earlier. Maybe they did and figured they'd much rather build it in-house than spend a fortune buying Tinder or something simiar—like they did with Snap.
Facebook knows us better than anyone else [1]<p>However, this means that Facebook may know better than anyone who I would be best to date.<p>I'm excited to see where this goes, and a little terrified.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-you-better-than-anyone-else.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-yo...</a>
Darn it, I'll have to reactivate Facebook. Almost every dating site requires a Facebook login for authentication too, they will be hit hard depending on how well Facebook makes this.<p>I'm very cynical about Facebook, but just like their blue collar job listings, this has serious potential if done right.
I cant wait for the facebook breakups feature next year. More seriously, it is interesting how much power facebook has in setting social norms and this will give it significantly more. They will be able to export american dating habits worldwide.
I am glad I am married and in my forties so that I missed all this.<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/606588504/americans-are-a-lonely-lot-and-young-people-bear-the-heaviest-burden" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/6065885...</a>
Can someone explain me my it has not been done (AFAIK) by someone else?<p>Facebook holds all the data needed and deep style of life analytics can be performed on it to find the most suitable match. I had the idea to make an app that exploits the data, but does Facebook API access restricted this kind of usage?<p>Why Tinder, woking on a random principle is working so well?
Most dating apps have some kind of integration with Facebook and/or Instagram this seems like a no-brainer. I have seen apps use FB data about liked movies, shows, places etc to generate matches. So, this should work very well.<p>Though that leaves a question - What next for apps relying heavily on FB data?
I’m not a huge Facebook fan these days, but I think this is an example of market expansion that really makes sense. Instead of trying to find more creative ways to advertise to users, identify new services you can sell directly to users based off of all of the data you’ve collected on them.
While I applaud Facebook finally focusing on facilitating real world interactions, I am concerned with them getting more central control over people’s lives.<p>Why hasn’t anyone else built an open source competitor to Facebook, like Wordpress for social networks?<p>I started a company 7 years ago and put a lot of effort to build such a platform. Now we recently launched 1.0 . I really thought someone would beat us to it. But somehow we are the first complete platform to market?<p>Now we plan to make it easier to install, build a community, build a social activity browser, and build out apps for communities.<p>Feedback welcome:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI</a>
Dating service for FB is too obvious of a feature, I am surprised they just start doing it now.<p>A social network is an obvious place for people to meet new people. I think this is a really good idea for FB.
I have a thought that this is the consequence of GDPR. Just like Google's NBU (Next Billion Users) division which focuses on the Indian subcontinent, I think we will see a lot of Europe centric initiatives from the large companies... primarily to service a vacuum that will be created because of the GDPR.<p>Dating is a very contentious issue in Europe and USA because of the GDPR,FOSTA,etc. I don't see anyone other than huge conglomerates being able to muster the legal resources to win here.
I can understand why they exclude Facebook friends. However I feel many of my dating prospects are already Facebook friends who I have largely neglected, so this feature would be a significant deterrent to me using the service. There must be some compromise here.<p>Meeting someone briefly and adding them as a friend should not exclude them from my dating pool! That would seem to hurt everyone involved - Facebook, me and the other person.
One big advantage that facebook will leverage is that they don't WANT you to keep coming back for more dating. They 'll have you on the platform anyway, so they might as well give you the best quality matches from the get-go (plus they do have some of the best AI, so dating might even stop existing as a thing in a few years)
> Users can launch text-only private messages, separate from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.<p>Now what's that about? You can keep your history of initial messages in your messenger history after you're married/in a relationship?<p>Is this some poor idea of following Google in self-fracturing messenger apps into incompatible silos?
The concern I have is that your dating profile will be hidden from people on your friends list. It's a bit unsettling that someone can start a dating profile hidden from an SO. And equally unsettling if FB blocked people who list a relationship status if they are polyamorus.
Makes sense for Facebook to get into, considering people have been unofficially using it as a dating service since its inception, and officially using it indirectly through third party apps.<p>Will Tinder/Match etc make it possible to signup for their services without Facebook?
The question here is, what will be the ground left for startups? There are already sectors, where barrier to join so high practically nobody new can join (cars, banking, chip productions...). Do we really want web to become property of few?
Created a similar app like this a while back which was dating between friends and events, it had some traction but will face issues like seeing similar people etc.<p>Link: <a href="http://lucid.fyi" rel="nofollow">http://lucid.fyi</a>
from what my friends who work for dating sites tell me, they basically are flickr for nude photos.<p>So we can't trust Facebook with our data but they want to store our nude photos.<p>That's some professional level doubling down for you:)<p>On a serious note, RIP Match.com/IAC. They are getting blown up in the past 30 minutes.<p>Facebook should treat carefully, when you can just walk in and start owning an entire category, that starts to get government attention for no other reason that the failed companies complain....loudly.<p>I don't think FB wants more government attention at this point.<p>I always assumed that someone like Linked In, or even, Bloomberg would start a dating app.
One of the core advantages I see here is trust. It would be so much more effective to match with someone who is connected to you by shared people/interest, rather than just a photo card.
The greatest minds in our industry are focused on solving two main (apparent) problems:<p>1. How to we get people to click on more ads?<p>2. How do we get more people laid?<p>Somehow I find this depressing, all that wasted talent.
They see the writing in the wall that tracking will be regulated and with that a nice chunk of revenue is gone. So they try to make up for it, one vertical at a time.
So now all the data they have about me browsing the internet can be used to find a woman who has a complimentary meta data set? Hopefully she's pretty too.
I may as well throw in my suggestion for this feature, since I'm sure there are facebook employees here somewhere:<p>Finder.<p>Like, Facebook meets Tinder.. but for finding companionship.
makes sense, wondering why it took so long to roll out this feature, isn't this one of the original uses that Zuck had in mind when he created Facebook?
If I used online dating services, I'd be thrilled at this initiative: a lure for the catastrophically stupid, hopefully keeping them off whatever competitor I'd use.
I’m long MTCH and FB. I’m not worried, here’s why:<p>Despite what people think, Tinder (owned by MTCH) is not that dependent on Facebook, people can sign up through alternative means, and will probably continue to do so as their audience starts to bring in younger users over time.<p>Facebook is better off buying Tinder outright than attempting to roll its own platform. Sorry, as much as I believe in Facebook, some of their in house projects never seem to pan out the way people think, though they do get announced with a lot of fanfare.<p>I see a good entry point for new investors in MTCH in the coming days. I will be increasing my position.
All the other dating sites just import your profile pictures and all your personal information from Facebook anyway, so...<p>Kind of surprising it took this long.
This seems to be restricted to users who are not marked as married or in a relationship, which excludes a whole swathe of people who are poly or variously non-monogamous. Pretty disappointing, given this restriction isn't there on other dating services.