Facebook Dating launches in 14 more countries, will come to US in 2019, adds Secret Crush feature to let users select up to 9 friends for Tinder-like matching
and it was promptly hacked (by a frat) and published, and the rest of my senior year was basically a series of awkward encounters in campus bars. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! http://twitter.com/... Sophie Vershbow / @svershbow : “Protect our privacy!” “Stop Russians from stealing elections!” “Ban Nazis!” Facebook: “Hear me out...Myspace Top 8 for people who wanna bang.” http://www.wired.com/... Christina Grace / @c_gracet : Given that my Facebook feed is married women in their 50s/60s and friends of my parents, this seems like a bold strategy. http://www.wired.com/... @mixedracescum : Talk about not knowing your demographic. I guess they sold all the data that would've shown them how awful an idea this is 🥴 http://twitter.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : So like Bang With Friends http://www.forbes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Stacy-Marie Ishmael / @s_m_i : Does anyone know the composition of the teams working on this? Asking because obviously http://twitter.com/... Ashley Carman / @ashleyrcarman : this is wild, imagine getting a push saying one of your friends has a crush on you but you have no idea who it is, and the only way to find out is to pick the people you have crushes on, too http://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This rollout closes a year-long loop: Facebook first unveiled the dating feature at F8 in May 2018 with a separate profile and match recommendations, then spent the summer running internal employee tests before today's expansion to 14 countries and a promised 2019 US launch.
Secret Crush is the provocative part — it revives the friend-list-as-romance-graph idea Tinder tried with Tinder Social in Australia in 2016, and commentators are already comparing it to Myspace Top 8 and Bang With Friends, with privacy criticism attached from day one.
First-order effects
- Users in the 14 launch countries can now build a separate dating profile inside the main app, and anyone they name in Secret Crush — up to nine friends — becomes part of someone else's matching data whether or not they opted into dating at all.
Second-order effects
- Tinder and other Match Group apps face a competitor that costs nothing extra and sits where non-dating-app users already are, forcing them to differentiate on features rather than distribution; the immediate backlash over Secret Crush also hands regulators and privacy critics a fresh, concrete example of Facebook repurposing social graph data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the line between social networking and dating platforms keeps eroding in both directions — Facebook absorbing matchmaking, while apps like Bumble push back toward platonic uses — leaving the durable question of whether a dating product can work when it depends on users actively maintaining their main Facebook presence.
The trend: Social platforms are converting existing friend graphs into dating inventory, collapsing the boundary between social networks and dedicated matchmaking apps.