Tinder is testing a button that lets you directly share other people's profiles via text message; links expire after five clicks or 72 hours
Tinder is testing a ‘share button’ that lets you play matchmaker — Tinder is testing out a “share” button that lets you send someone's Tinder profile to a friend.
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2016 Tinder began testing a share button that lets users text other people's profiles to friends, with links expiring after five clicks or 72 hours — an early experiment in pushing match discovery outside the app itself.
The idea kept resurfacing: Tinder later shipped Tinder Stacks, an iMessage app for swiping on friends' photos, then Tinder Matchmaker let loved ones view and recommend matches, and by 2024 Share My Date let users share date plans with friends via link. This 2016 test is the first data point in that arc.
First-order effects
- Users gain a native way to play matchmaker over SMS, while people whose profiles get shared have their photos and details circulating outside Tinder's walls — bounded only by the five-click and 72-hour expiry limits.
Second-order effects
- Messaging apps, iMessage in particular, become a distribution surface for dating discovery — a direction Tinder formalized months later with the Stacks iMessage app rather than leaving to screenshots.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from share button to Matchmaker to Share My Date holds, Tinder's matching product increasingly treats friends as a first-class input — vetting and recommending moves from a solo swipe into a social process, with expiring links as the control mechanism.
The trend: Dating apps are progressively opening their matching graphs to users' real-world social circles, with Tinder iterating from ad-hoc profile sharing toward structured friend-in-the-loop features.