Facebook has started a dating service back in September whereby Colombia is the first country to experience it firsthand, but now the dating site has reached Thailand and also Canada. Facebook’s dating service is called Facebook Dating, and it’s more like an app within the Facebook app made for Facebook users.
The first thing to know is that the service is only available to users who are 18 and above, and this is verified by Facebook checking on the age of the user’s friends, not by the age the user filled in their Facebook page in case it’s not real. While it seems like an effort to prevent underage users to sign up for the dating service, it is not foolproof enough and can still be inaccurate. Besides that, as the dating service was just launched in the two countries, users who signed up will not immediately have matches yet because Facebook plans on waiting for adequate number of people to join the service before starting the matchmaking.
Users who are eligible will have to create a new profile whereby only the first name and the age will be visible, then Facebook will suggest other users who either have common interests or have mutual friends but rest assured that Facebook will not suggest users from your friend list. Now many might feel that Facebook Dating is similar to Tinder, but the one advantage of Facebook’s Dating service is that it offers a second look feature that allows user to reconsider matches that they may have declined previously. Facebook Dating also does not offer the swipe and like feature like Tinder, instead users have to send a message if they’re interested in getting to know the other party.
Users will have to answer a question that was already set by the other party on their profiles, and should the other party be satisfied or interested in responding, the conversation between both users may continue. However, if the receiver does not want to respond to the answer given by first party, the first party will not be able to continue sending messages to the receiver. This is to ensure that users are not being spammed with messages when they’re not responding or not interested in conversing with the other party.
Those who are using the dating service will also be assured that they won’t be exposed by Facebook as the company promises that the dating activity will not be shared or published on their Newsfeed or Facebook profile. The product manager of Facebook Dating, Nathan Sharp also said that the service received great responses from Colombia, which is probably why Facebook is bringing the dating service to these two countries. If it continues to grow successfully, Facebook might be able to expand the dating service to countries all over the world and be on par with Tinder.
