Facebook is rolling out new ‘dating’ feature to help users fall in ‘love’

On its mission to introduce new features, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the site can soon also be used to find love, similar to a dating app.

The announcement was made on Tuesday during Zuckerberg’s keynote speech at F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference. The new upcoming update is probably designed to compete with other dating apps such as Tinder.

Informing about the update, Zuckerberg mentioned that this update is basically to help users find long-term relationships and ‘not just hookups’, reported Futurism. However, keeping in mind the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, the CEO claimed, “I want to be clear that we have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning.”

The feature will be available in Facebook app through an icon on the upper right corner of the screen that will take users to a portal named ‘Dating Home’. The dating profile can be made only via user’s first names and can’t be seen by friends or in the News Feed but, will be visible to those who have opted for the service too. The dating profiles will separate from the user’s regular profile and won’t include any data or media user puts on their regular profile.

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As Business Insider explains, similar to Tinder, there is an option of ‘interested’ or ‘pass’ the profiles of other people. If the other person responds, they will send a private message that won’t be connected to Facebook-owned WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and is text-only ‘as a safety measure’.

The idea, as per Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, came to them from those couples who informed Zuckerberg about how meeting their partners on Facebook was the most important thing ever happened to them.

The feature is an opt-in, people who do not wish to be a part of it can just simply chose not to. The goal as explained in the conference is to make a product that would let more couples to do the same ‘in a way that was opt-in, in a way that was safe, and in a way that took advantage of the unique properties of the platform and didn’t get in the way of everyone who wasn’t interested in dating’.

The launch date of this dating service has not been revealed but the social media site says it’s going to be here soon. In the conference, Zuckerberg announced a number of new Facebook features including a new option to wipe out data history.