With Facebook’s annual developer’s conference under way I was wondering what the big news of the day was going to be. Last year it was VR related news, with Facebook announcing Spaces, a way for people’s digital avatars to hang out together in the same place. This year, it’s likely the news that Facebook is FINALLY adding a dating component to the site!
As The Verge puts it, “The features are a long time coming for the 14-year-old social network, which has allowed users to broadcast whether they’re single or in a relationship since it first went live in February 2004. The move will likely transform Facebook, with its more than 2.2 billion monthly active users, into a major competitor of Match Group, which owns and operates mobile dating app Tinder and popular dating platform OkCupid. Match Group’s stock plummeted by more than 17 percent as soon as the news was announced.
‘This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships — not just for hookups,’ Zuckerberg joked onstage. He added that it’s going to be within the main Facebook app, but it will be completely optional and opt-in only. ‘We have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning. Your friends aren’t going to see your profile, and you’re only going to be suggested to people who are not your friends.’”
To be honest I have no idea why it took Facebook 14 years to add this feature. After all, the company is built around the premise of bringing people together and making the world more inter-connected and there’s no better way to do that than to help people find love. Plus the entire point of the app in the first place was to rank hot girls. You would have thought that a dating app component would have been the first thing they would have done! Oh, well. Better late than never.
Is Facebook Dating the Greatest Idea Ever?
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