Facebook Dating app lets you list your crushes

Facebook at its F8 annual developer conference revealed more details about its upcoming dating feature which the social media giant calls Facebook Dating and is built directly into the main mobile app. The USP of the app is its ‘Secret Crush’ feature that allows users to list nine of their Facebook friends on whom they are secretly crushing. And similar to Tinder, if both the user use Facebook Dating and had listed each other as a Secret Crush, they will get a notification. Otherwise, the crush will remain secret.

Facebook Dating is currently available in Colombia, Thailand, Canada, Argentina, and Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana, and Suriname.

If your crush has opted into Facebook Dating, they will get a notification saying that someone has a crush on them. If your crush adds you to their Secret Crush list, it’s a match! If your crush isn’t on Dating, doesn’t create a Secret Crush list, or doesn’t put you on their list, no one will know that you’ve entered a friend’s name.

The idea of anyone having nine secret crushes at the same time seems an emotional tangle to imagine. While users have been moving away from Messenger, the social media giant still operates under the assumption that many users still frequently update their profile by adding new friends on the Facebook, and not soon on Instagram.

The feature has already been compared to the weird, failed dating app Bang With Friends (which relaunched as Down in 2013) but is more structurally similar to the also-doomed Slack integration built by the polyamory-centric dating app Feeld in 2017, which was supposed to pair up work crushes and was publicly shot down as an HR nightmare.

In terms of design, the Facebook Dating looks similar to Hinge with profiles consisting of a series of photos paired with icebreaker prompts. Instead of swiping, the app allows you to scroll through profiles and gives you an option to message anyone without matching first. The profiles only carry your first name, age, and GPS-verified location. The rest of the information you are required to fill in is similar to you would do for any other dating app.

On Facebook Dating, you can opt in to discover potential matches within your own Facebook communities: events, groups, friends of friends and more.