Facebook’s data backed approach in helping you find your romance starts rolling out today. The featured, christened for now as ‘Facebook dating’ is starting to roll out in Colombia. This latest addition to Facebook’s gamut of social media apps was announced in its F8 developer conference, earlier this year.
However, Colombians who are a part of this test wont immediately start finding matches. Facebook will wait until it finds just right quantum of profiles to start with the matching. Of course, it is currently open only for those aged 18 and above.
The app was rolled out in May this year, and more details have now come from Facebook on the overall structure and feature-set of the apps. Example feature sets include limiting users to expressing interest in a maximum of 100 people per day, highlighting more personal facts about you via your profile, and defaulting to show you friends-of-friends as well as strangers, unless of course you choose to make it otherwise.
Users will have the option to discover others with similar interests through their Groups or Events. However, what people do within the dating feature will not be shown to their friends.
An early preview of the app also shows that it is nothing similar to a Tinder or the multitude of ‘swiping-is-everything’ dating apps out there. What Facebook is trying to achieve, is help you find the right match based algorithm that takes into account multiple data points that the company has about you, and no other service has access to. So yes, this feature will perhaps be more inclined towards helping you find long-term meaningful commitments, rather than usual hookups.
How it works
As soon as any 18+ user comes up on Facebook, they will see a po-up notification of sorts, asking them to try the dating app, if available in their region.
The user will then opt in, verify their city using their phone’s location services, and decide whether to add details like a free-form bio, workplace, education, religion, height, and if they have children. Facebook offers non-binary genders and sexual orientations. It will also include a dozen or more questions about tinier details as well. This can be like “What kind of music you like ?” etc. You fill the form in and that is basically it.
The user will now filter the distance you want to find a match in, or choose based on a multitude of other selection options. Users can also choose to ‘Unlock’ Events and Groups they’re part of to see people from those who’ve done the same.
The text and emoji-only messages go through a special Facebook Dating chat section, not Messenger, and land in the recipient’s Interested tab with no read receipts.
