The Facebook Dating "Secret Crush" feature is likely to be chaos
The Internet is in love, and the Internet is in love with the crushes has been particularly strong in the past year or so.
It was Call me by Your name and the cult of Timothée Chalamet, then To all the boys I loved before and the cult of Noah Centineo. Then came the one-woman crush empire Tessa Thompson and Lorde acolyte Conan Grey's first hit single "Crush Culture." These were all, according to my prediction, predicted by Tiana Reid's viral essay on crushes for the New Inquiry: "Teen crush transforms into an adult life with endless crushes, the possibility of intense attachments to many people simultaneously."
It's been so funny ! And now Facebook gets involved.
On its annual developer conference on Tuesday, the company provided more details about its exciting dating feature Facebook Dating, which is built directly into the main mobile. The most interesting development is that Facebook Dating has a "Secret Crush" feature that lets users list nine of their Facebook friends who they secretly crush. If you are both enrolled in Facebook Dating and you both list one another as a Secret Crush, you get a notice. Otherwise, love will remain secret.
If a friend you are secretly in love with is not enrolled in Facebook Dating, you can still list them. Facebook seems to assume that people will be so raven curious who can possibly give them a love they want to sign up for the service just to see.
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The idea that someone who has nine secret crushes at the same time is of course very funny and also an impossible emotional tangle to imagine. Facebook also seems to work under the premise that most users are still updating their social circle by adding new friends to the capital and not downloading their professional, personal and romantic lives, such as Instagram.
If I was pushed to pick nine people from my Facebook friends that I would consider dealing with, it would be a real challenge. Some guys from my freshman dorm? A former scholar without a salary at some horrible magazine? The recipient from the orthodontist's office? No idea where he lives now. But if you have one of those weird years with someone from high school or college, I suppose Facebook has told them that you want to smooch now, would be an interesting development in your story.
The feature has already been compared to the weird, failed computer program Bang With Friends (which resurrected as Down in 2013), but is more structurally similar to the doomed slack integration built by polyamory-centric dating app Feeld i 2017, who was supposed to pair up a workout and was publicly shot down as an HR nightmare.
this is wild, think of getting a print saying that one of your friends has a crush on you, but you have no idea who it is, and the only way to figure out is to pick the people you have crushed on, also https://t.co/zQ0aIdaJvo
Design-wise, it is similar to Hinge, and profiles consist of a series of images paired with icebreaker messages. You scroll through profiles instead of swiping, and you can notify anyone without matching first. However, the profiles are different from Facebook profiles, but only transfer your first name, age, and GPS verified location. The rest you fill out just as you would for any other dating app. Outside Secret Crush, Facebook removes your Facebook friends from the profiles you want to see – a real leg up Hinge, who regularly shows me my colleagues and friends close to friends.
Facebook also emphasizes its real-world relevance by integrating groups and events into the dating function – hoping people will choose to show their profile to users they are likely to come across in real life already.
So far there are no ads or paid features in Facebook Dating, so it's still to see how the project can make money. When Facebook Dating was announced, Product Manager Nathan Sharp The Verge gave rather vague reasons why it existed: "Dating has been a behavior we've seen on Facebook for a very long time. We want to make it easier and more comfortable for people to engage in. We just thought it was the right time. "
But there is big money in dating apps. Analysts say the market can be worth $ 12 billion a year by 2020, based on the business model of the Match Group. Match Group, which owns Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com, Lots of fish, hinges and more than 40 other dating-related businesses, brought in revenue of $ 1.7 billion last year from advertising, paid membership, and a la carte premium features, as Tinder's seemingly popular "Super Like."
Finally, Facebook must make money from your crushes. Especially since it is about privacy, it will probably cause at least some of the revenue from the public news stream and because it is currently putting away $ 3 billion to give the Federal Trade Commission a penalty for repeated violations privacy.
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