Facebook to offer dating service for the first time, take on Tinder

You can now find love on Facebook. Facebook is getting into a matchmaking business. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced Tuesday that the social giant is launching a new dating app. This makes it the first time the world’s largest social media network has actively tried to help people form romantic relationships. Facebook plans to share more about the features in the next two months.

Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook’s annual F8 conference that a dating service would be a natural fit for a company that specializes in connecting people online. “There are 200 million people on Facebook that list themselves as single, so clearly there’s something to do here,” Zuckerberg said. Contrary to earlier speculation about Facebook excluding some users based on their marital or relationship status, Facebook made a further clarification that it’s in fact not excluding users based on relationship status info.

The feature would be for finding long-term relationships, “not just hook-ups,” Zuckerberg said. It will be optional and will launch soon, he added, without giving a specific day. Zuckerberg also said that the dating service is being built with privacy in mind, so that friends will not be able to see a person’s dating profile.

So, what does this announcement mean for companies like Tinder, Match.com? One thing that is clear at this point is that this would hurt Tinder service as dating apps like Tinder have long relied on Facebook’s data to operate their service. Before this announcement, there was report back in early April that the new Facebook data policy was already crashing Tinder. In the meantime, shares of Match Group, the parent company of dating platforms like Tinder, Match.com and OKCupid, dropped by as much as 19% on Tuesday afternoon following the news.

Facebook users will be able to set up their dating profiles with their first name. Facebook said the their names won’t be visible to friends and will not appear in News Feeds. According to Facebook, the dating feature is opt-in and users will not be matched with people they are already friends with.

Facebook CEO also used the forum to address the concerns about data privacy issue and what the social giant is doing to protect users’ data. Zuckerberg said Facebook was building a new privacy control called “clear history” to allow users to delete their browsing history. “This feature will enable you to see the websites and apps that send us information when you use them, delete this information from your account, and turn off our ability to store it associated with your account going forward,” the company said in a separate blog post.

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