Facebook is launching a dating feature
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Instead of being an "infrastructure" layer like they have touted to be in the past, they are now getting into verticals. So anyone building a consumer focused business that relies on a graph should be pretty paranoid about what the future may hold, just as anyone in the retail/ecommerce world is already scared of amazon. Especially if you're using facebook auth or facebook ads to drive your business: because it tells them whether you're worth coming after or not.
Think of the forces at play here:
- (1) Facebook already has an enormous, aggressive, and well funded team ready to pounce on new consumer apps that are up and coming. See Snapchat features, and the dozens of other apps that have gotten to the first tier of success only to be out gunned by facebook.
- (2) The rapidly shrinking facebook API landscape (and related platforms), due to the Cambridge analytics stuff and other concerns. API access is shrinking, not growing, with many platforms (like WhatsApp) with no plans to ever even have one.
- (3) The prevalence of facebook ads as a "first place" to learn and iterate on your business. If you think they are ignoring the rapidly scaling consumer businesses, you're wrong.
- (4) And now finally, their willingness to go into verticals instead of stay at the infrastructure level. They have the perfect storm to come after any consumer business with network effects at the core of its functionality.
This is far from their first `vertical`. Events, groups, marketplace... Eventbrite/whatever is still here, meetup is still here, and craigslist is still here too.
To give an example, Facebook Marketplace has become a considerable threat for "Small Items for Sale" category in emerging markets where classified websites other than Craigslist are dominant.
With its strong user profile integration that keeps out fake sellers, Marketplace has become a huge sell in countries like India, Pakistan and UAE.
I am definitely not surprised if Facebook would be going in for a vertical approach. Messenger used to be a part of Facebook. It's a stand alone product for a while now with bots for virtually anything (sellers are using them to give out promo codes), a separate mobile app and even a web app.
However, I don't see this verticalization to necessarily happen as a non-Facebook experience though. For Instagram, it makes sense to keep it that way and not bring it inside Facebook. For Marketplace and Events, it might not be the case because it needs that strong network affect and makes Facebook work as a platform to find, do and participate in things.
This is particularly useful when trying to find new events per se. For example, I see a friend marking himself "interested" for a particular event on Facebook. I do the same and reach him out on Messenger to ask him / her to go together.
I have to stick to Facebook because one way or the other, it gives me an avenue to socialize because people I know are there, use it regularly and are contributor to the network effect.
I also see many uni kids flipping their textbooks and other small belongings on it, because it's really easy and right there in the app everyone looks at all the time. It also targets location, so uni kids living on campus sell directly to other uni kids living on campus and so exchanges become trivially easy.
It may not have disrupted the US market, but it's certainly had an impact elsewhere.
I offload items I don’t want anymore via Craigslist in the US. I try to give away or sell items at a low cost to reduce the hassle and time that I have to invest (a great deal is less likely to turn into a person who cancels at the last minute after I’ve set aside time to meet). For items with a cost, the majority of emails are insulting low bids.
Glad to know this isn’t a local / regional issue.
"Craigslist will generate revenue of almost $700 million this year [full year 2016], with a profit margin around 80 percent — making it the most profitable classified advertising site in the world, the AIM Group reports in its Global Classified Advertising Annual."
"it managed to increase revenue by 75 percent in 2016 over the estimated 2015 total"
https://aimgroup.com/2016/11/29/craigslist-revenue-soars-aga...
Story from May 2017 talking about how well they're doing:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-cra...
The AIM Group's long term chart on Craiglist's estimated revenue, year by year:
https://i.imgur.com/cAwd2T3.jpg
Obviously we'll see how Craigslist fairs over a longer period of time vs Facebook market. However, Craigslist is a free listing service for the typical user, as such Facebook is a modest threat - people can trivially list on both services.
imho this has always been the ace up FB's sleeve in terms of monetization and justifying their market cap.
I do agree on Facebook there is more noise than I found on craigslist. I think this is because of the UX, Facebook makes it easy to send a false positive for interest whereas on craigslist it takes more effort and therefore reduces the signal to noise ratio for buyers who are actually interested.
Dating might be seen as a bit too much though; many people (for whatever reasons they have for it) prefer to keep their dating life away from their normal interactions. It depends on how it works, but it seems unlikely it will be seperated from the normal experience which I think will be a big hurdle for many. Then again, maybe it's already known and fixed as this is the first time I read about it.
Then again i never saw anyone using the shopping feature with success, so i know it's all just point of view.
Here it's common to ask a girl/boy for their Facebook once you have met, but meeting someone on Facebook seems difficult. Would you do it through a group?
Yes you can. I don't have any 'friends' on Facebook but have a long list of Messenger contacts and groups.
That's probably more useful information to Facebook than some nebulous graph of people I vaguely know. Messenger contacts are those with whom I actively engage.
Safer for a girl than meeting a rando off tinder or okc in terms of online dating
Edit: should also point out you might just be a neckbeard or fogey and may be unaware of your more socially aware fellow spaniards using Facebook to date
The marketplace features Facebook added to groups are a light support for how people were using groups anyway.
Dating site like features on Facebook, besides just sending messages, were always apps.
Facebook Marketplace is really good for niche buying and selling, since you can have a group dedicated to specific topics.
When they break themselves away from this (which they arguably have with their attempts to embed more in Messenger - I can foresee a future test being you subscribing to video channels/news brands in Messenger and having bots push the latest vids out, history repeats itself), and open up a few more interaction mechanics, things could change.
If Facebook gains access to people's medical data (as Google definitely has), they could literally use this "dating feature" as a high level population breeding program.
With the level of ethics they've displayed so far - practically none - it wouldn't be super surprising to find them doing it. :/
It's not at all hard to think of at least a few countries whose leadership would happily engage them for this.
They'd be the one's paying money for Facebook to do "targeted dating influenced by specific factors". ie genetics.
Depending upon the verification/validation of results they want, it's probably not an 18 year wait. Initial data would be what... school grades entered into centralised system (guessing)? Higher year level grades, aptitude tests, uni/college (etc) would be follow on ones down the track.
Anyway, the point doesn't seem far fetched at all. And Facebook + medical data would be right there. :/
https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f...
That means exponential growth (a reasonable guess at what the curve looks like, initially) has to plateau, eventually.
They haven't even been secretive about it. Look at their last big vertical push: Facebook marketplace.
They're just trying to follow Google's footsteps to become a full Internet portal. That's why Zuck tried so hard to bring Facebook Zero to India and Africa, and why Zuck is kissing Jinping's feet.
They want nothing short of complete market domination.
Just don't go after generic solutions, but choose a niche.
How is this new?
Even if you're on a separate dating service like Tinder, you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. FB already plays a large role in dating and the signaling involved. It just makes sense for FB to own the process from start to finish when they have the ability to do it better than any existing dating app today.
FYI: Shares of Match Group (they are a public holdings company for many of the popular dating sites out there) plunged after FB announced this.
I see FB dating as having similar success. I can see you and your connections and validate that you aren't going to kill or rape me when we meet up for coffee (or if you're male; I can see that you are a real person and not a bot).
Interesting. In my area, Facebook Marketplace is almost all stolen/burgled/shoplifted goods. People even call it "Fencebook."
Want a brand new, unopened PS/4 for $25? Fencebook to the rescue!
If they're selling close to the original price, just get it from a shop instead, that way you'll get warranty etc too (there's generally no warranty on goods with "lost" invoices).
In general, look out for suspicious behaviour. Are they willing to meet with you at their home or office? Do they readily share their phone number? Do they have many excuses (one of the most common tells for liers are an excess of over-thought out excuses) for not doing things transparently? If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
Edit: never mind, just realized you're worried I or someone else is trying to sell stolen goods and will abuse such a list that way, sigh...
I'm curious because I've used Craigslist all across the west coast in the USA and I've never found myself worried. I've used it for bigger ($XXXX) and small purchases ($X). Brand new and very used. Most people I've met are very friendly and decently honest. Flakey is usually my biggest complaint with Craigslist people.
Other than that, the pseudo anonymity makes people uncomfortable with craigslist. At least, that’s the sentiment I’ve gotten from a few people who’ve used it. Contrasting that with the feedback I’ve heard about marketplace, people just feel safer when you can creep a buyer’s profile before they show up at your house.
This seems like a joke question, of course. But consider: Ten years or fifteen years from now, supposing nearly everyone is using Facebook's dating service, could Facebook Inc adjust their matching algorithm to give shittier / less promising results to those people for whom it identifies as having a dislike for Facebook Inc's behaviour? Conceivably, what about matching them with someone who is likely to be sterile?
Could those who express objections to Facebook Inc's behaviour be gradually phased out of the population (not completely, obviously), by a motivated director, over a few generations?
Possessing objections to domineering corporate behaviour does not have to be genetic, nor does it even have to be overwhelmingly heritable -just mostly so- for Facebook Inc's incentives and capacities to align towards considering this sort of dystopian strategy.
I don't raise this because I imagine it to be true at all; I raise it because we are reluctant to spend time actually considering these kind of hypotheticals for how massively-dominent social platforms might affect our society and way of life, and often as a society we only consider them in retrospect. For example, Cambridge Analytica's unethical actions are a fairly predictable outcome of Facebook's business model and have (already) now lead to significant negative effects on a worldwide scale.
Consider planned destructive testing in engineering, where perhaps one component is built purposefully weakened and then the whole system stressed in order to ascertain where and how the other components fail in response. This can lead to better understanding and to superior alternative designs in future.
In a related way, we can imagine destructive testing on facets of our institutions and societies, and try to ascertain how our systems may then fail in turn.
One example is when designing constitutional separation of powers, we might find it implausible to imagine a president intentionally undermining the Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, but yet still design the constitutional separation of powers in such a way that the system retains some amount of robustness or integrity should that ever eventuate.
We might choose to design our medical quarantine protocols in such a way that they don't overly rely on protecting against known agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, amoebae etc) but have some robustness against not yet encountered classes of threat, eg quarantine protocols that were concieved before the discovery of prion diseases.
(Or at least used to allow, don't know the current state.)
If fb shared more data I'm not sure how well that would go over, at least here.
Doesn't mean they're not up for hookups though.
Fear of everything you do in private being creepy is just a self-limiting belief.
Digging for bikini pics isn't part of the process here.
I don't think it's any less weird to meet up in person with someone after just seeing 3-5 pictures of them and a vapid bio. Looking at the Facebook profile can give you a sense of how they conduct themselves and whether they're crazy. Like if their wall is dedicated to some MLM scheme and they get in fights with their friends/family. Or whether their Tinder pictures are from 5 years and 100 lbs ago.
If you think it's weird, then I'm not convinced you've used Tinder enough to escalate it into a date. If you did, you'd know that having one mutual friend in common makes it easy to hunt them down and even if you don't, Tinder gives you enough info to anyways unless they have their privacy settings jacked up.
You lookup people from Tinder on Facebook? For what?
I would say its not a sanity test; you just simply a creep.
Worst. Sanity test. Evar!
Stalking and/or looking up 13 year old college party photos is probabally, shall we say, less sane.
I’m curious what the point of F8 actually is at this stage. The platform has become so restricted that social apps can’t be built anymore. Facebook should just acknowledge that outside developers have outlived their usefulness now that they have helped the service attract 2 billion users, and scrap the conference.
The recent breaking instagram API update without warning was a big enough FU to developers to confirm this.
That being said, it's hard to criticize them for internalizing something like this given that letting external services build on them is what landed them in this mess in the first place.
I am a: [man]
Interested in: [women]
Relationship status: [single]
Fave quotes, fave music, about me.
Then, all that got put on hold as FB was built out in every way except that (including adding the Wall, and then the News Feed). They must have realized that FB could be something much larger than a dating network, that would get used indefinitely by its customers, without pigeonholing their primary use case.
I'm surprised it took this long to pull the trigger on this feature, though.
I would sincerely like to see a paid for version of Facebook. I would easily fork out as much as I fork out for Netflix for a service that would offer me the same functions without all the profiling, with more granular control on shaping the user experience (i.e. I would rearrange my FB dashboard to focus on groups, events and messaging, while having the newsfeed as a secondary page).
So 4 times as much.
Realistically, as the early adopter, I'd have to pay for myself and my 731 facebook friends, since none of them would want to pay for it. So, like, closer to $18k a year.
You could design a paid Google that did less tracking, less personalization - how do you design a paid FB without your personal info?
You don't understand how Facebook makes money.
They sell advertising to companies who are willing to pay because you came and spend money on their site / purchased their product.
It is NOT true that everyone clicked ad and ended up buying a product. Only minority did. Hence, if you can afford to fork out serious cash like Netflix fee, you are statistically much more worth to advertisers than someone who would only pay $1, or as majority - would click ad and left with abandoned/empty basket.
You will never see paid version of Facebook.
This is the most chilling thing I've read in a while.
Time spent thumbing through selfies on a dating app on a 2.5" by 5" screen, is less effective ( from a sexually reproductive standpoint ) than going up and introducing yourself to members of the opposite sex. But then again, we can throw any biological theories of evolution out the windows, because you're more than likely using contraceptives at any rate.
1. You gotta be pretty photogenic. This is a very strange one because I find more people more attractive in real life than in photos. The people who do look appealing in photos tend to have more angular faces and better proportions, but honestly in the end what matters most is how we look in real life.
2. You’re at an advantage if you’re extroverted and have pictures of you attending many social events. A good number of “friends” that you randomly hang out with helps too.
3. If you want to stand out, you better hope you have a close friend who is at least a hobby level photographer and goes out to most places with you.
Yea, I’m screwed. I never prepared myself to have an outstanding social presence, and it’s too late at this point.
I met the love of my life last year, on email.
But there are obviously more efficient ways to meet people who may be interested in you.
If two people are out on a first date who met over WoW, they probably have better long term chances than people who met on a real dating site. (Admittedly, people who met on Tinder might have excellent chances of getting what they want; assuming that's nothing to do with the long term).
My partner and I met via Tinder after both of us had cycled through a lot of dates, and we catch ourselves saying "god damn are we lucky" over and over and over again. They say you make your own luck by increasing your surface area, yea?
Sometimes, I wonder if the whole "we got lucky," thing was just that they did get lucky, but only for long enough to bootstrap them into having spent enough time around each other to get attached. My experience of human nature is that everyone is actually really, really close to the same once you get to know them.
Just as there is a dozen of hyperactive “technology” subreddits and I don’t know what’s the equivalent on facebook (communities), but we’re still discussing it on HN.
I feel apps or websites which are exclusive to dating have something weird about them.
Facebook tries to become the kitchen sink of the internet, like that company from China.
But that's not to say this won't do well. It probably will.
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/faceboo...
- another income source from the same data. (ads and dating)
- even more information about their users and in a justifiable way. Users want them to make good matches.
- another costumer lock-in. It will be even more difficult to quit FB.
But on your third point, I see an escape: Get married. Then you're free to leave FB.
Out of the frying pan, straight into the fire!
And I'd hate to create yet another facebook account for this. So, yeah, as shitty as the dating scene is I'd prefer a 3rd party so that I can attempt at compartmentalize my accounts.
Coincidentally, my social circle is approximately 0. It has never previously occured to me that this may not actually be a coincidence.
Is it no longer possible to reach people via text or phone?
I have a clean, libre LineageOS setup on my phone, except for whatsapp.
My family has entirely moved over to Telegram, though I think they also still use WhatsApp. It doesn't bother me - change starts with yourself.
I think the fact that they also announced incognito mode today suggests that this dating feature could be passive. Like, if you browse Facebook normally and you are both using this feature, and Facebook sees you are both stalking each other rather much, it could break the ice for you. This is probably the better the more oblivious you are and I can see the value in this.
It will also be interesting to see how this feature will be rolled out. While there can be a mutual attraction between two people, I can see it being a challenge to programmatically figure out whether there exist any other reasons why the relationship could not work, e.g. logistics, and how well is Facebook able to identify such possible problems before initiating the icebreaker.
Fine-grained matches might not be that great. What will one have to learn from a relationship? What new interests will be developed? I know that FB's sociologists and ML experts have been considering these aspects more than I, but I fear the continued segregation and viewpoint-reinforcement that FB and algorithmic association sites subtly (or invisibly) are forcing upon society.
What could possibly go wrong?
What will certainly give facebook a hard time in that market is the rule of isolation that people with moderate privacy concerns instinctively apply: you can't avoid creating a data trail if you want to do online dating, you can't avoid creating a data trail if you want to do friend feed social media, but if you can keep those data trails from merging you will gladly do whatever it takes.
It's the same thing that killed google+: if I have a choice between a friend feed site that also has all my web search history and a friend feed site that doesn't, it's absolutely clear which one is the lesser evil. For similar reasons I would not want to use a social network or a search engine operated by my desktop OS supplier (quitting this argument right here, before I convince myself to defect to iphone - guess I'm a bit inconsequential after all)
Why would they? The privacy problem with Facebook is its size and the amount of personal data it integrates. If you're privacy conscious, using a stand-alone dating site is fine because the data is more siloed. It's also more practical to setup a burner identity on a special-purpose site than on a one that tries to be your online identity and social graph.
I never used tinder, but I thought about it. Part of that plan was to create a burner FB profile for it.
... And The business model. A dating site you might pay for while you use it - there's no way to "pay" for Facebook in way that aligns fb's priorities to coincide with yours.
This is also a big problem with Google, although they have some experiments were they appear to be breaking even.
That's what I'm genuinely wondering about: Putting all the privacy issues aside, will some machine learning algorithm really be capable of predicting “functioning chemistry” between people?
Remember, you don't need to outrun a bear, just the other people around you.
Unlikely, but that's not really the point. Current dating sites can't predict "chemistry" either. What people are suggesting Facebook will be able to do better is work out who you are "compatible" with, it's then up to you to decide if there is any chemistry or not.
I don't get how everyone is so bullish here. I think if anything Mark should have waited a couple of months.
Not trying to be needlessly negative, I'm just surprised by the reaction here.
Birth rates declining. People getting married later, and having fewer kids.
Western Countries facing declining population in next 25 years.
Existential threat to their growth at all costs model.
Dating is an unsolvable problem. You can't be late to it. There will be people being born looking to find SOs so long as the human race exists. Even if Match captures 100% of the market this year, next year, another batch of kids will enter the "I'm getting older and everyone I know is settling down" panic.
However, this means that Facebook may know better than anyone who I would be best to date.
I'm excited to see where this goes, and a little terrified.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-yo...
I'm very cynical about Facebook, but just like their blue collar job listings, this has serious potential if done right.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/6065885...
I wouldn't even know how to do that without it.
The more women I can meet, the less I'm dependent on luck.
Over time I choose to spend more time with her, it turns into a relationship, I stop talking to others. Same for women. This is how dating works.
Since women are the ones approached, they already are picking from a line of suitors in general (compared to men) yet long term relationships are still forged. How?
It's like if you gave me three apples, and said "which one is the best," I'd be able to tell you pretty easily. If you gave me two thousand, the best one would probably be better, but I'd probably be very indecisive about which one was best, and probably be wondering even as I picked it whether perhaps another one was actually the best.
It's more like balancing spinning plates. You don't have the bandwidth to keep up more than a few, and you have a pretty good idea of which one is doing the best. Some of the plates drop off, or you stop them, or the other party does, and you can take on new ones as you please. Or you decide you're done looking. But that's exactly what you did. You settled after some samples.
But worrying about indecision because you have so many options is like worrying about exercise because you don't want to accidentally look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or not wanting to apply to too many jobs because you don't want to have too many godlike offers to choose from; Having so many women to choose from that you're indecisive is not easy and it's a quality problem to have, but I don't think that's most men's realities despite their efforts.
Facebook holds all the data needed and deep style of life analytics can be performed on it to find the most suitable match. I had the idea to make an app that exploits the data, but does Facebook API access restricted this kind of usage?
Why Tinder, woking on a random principle is working so well?
It's one of the few industries where doing a good job means far less revenue and customers.
It's not random. Location, FB friends, swipe stats on both sides, paid, not paid info all contributes to the queue you see.
Though that leaves a question - What next for apps relying heavily on FB data?
Why hasn’t anyone else built an open source competitor to Facebook, like Wordpress for social networks?
I started a company 7 years ago and put a lot of effort to build such a platform. Now we recently launched 1.0 . I really thought someone would beat us to it. But somehow we are the first complete platform to market?
Now we plan to make it easier to install, build a community, build a social activity browser, and build out apps for communities.
Feedback welcome:
So yes, many people beat you to market. But notice how you don't even know what or who they are. Nor does anybody else except some HN readers because they don't have any real traction.
A social network is an obvious place for people to meet new people. I think this is a really good idea for FB.
Dating is a very contentious issue in Europe and USA because of the GDPR,FOSTA,etc. I don't see anyone other than huge conglomerates being able to muster the legal resources to win here.
Fb (and other incumbents) are at an advantage, because they have a window to a/b test illegal profiles and algorithms against gdpr compliant ones, though.
Meeting someone briefly and adding them as a friend should not exclude them from my dating pool! That would seem to hurt everyone involved - Facebook, me and the other person.
Could you expound on your reasoning behind this?
Now what's that about? You can keep your history of initial messages in your messenger history after you're married/in a relationship?
Is this some poor idea of following Google in self-fracturing messenger apps into incompatible silos?
And it's really not Facebook's duty to decide who should be able to date.
Why couldn't Tinder go-ahead and sue them for anti-competitive behavior and get the FTC with them.
Will Tinder/Match etc make it possible to signup for their services without Facebook?
Link: http://lucid.fyi
So we can't trust Facebook with our data but they want to store our nude photos.
That's some professional level doubling down for you:)
On a serious note, RIP Match.com/IAC. They are getting blown up in the past 30 minutes.
Facebook should treat carefully, when you can just walk in and start owning an entire category, that starts to get government attention for no other reason that the failed companies complain....loudly.
I don't think FB wants more government attention at this point.
I always assumed that someone like Linked In, or even, Bloomberg would start a dating app.
I have never encountered a nude photo (or sent one) on any of the dating apps I've used (Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, League).
Why? I can tangentially see LinkedIn, but both LI and Bloomberg are very much professionally-oriented; a dating app would just lower their value in the eyes of professionals.
Facebook is a good vessel for a dating app because (A) Facebook profiles are probably the most annoying profile to fake and (B) the content you have on Facebook has some authenticity because your other friends generally see it as well.
For example, last I used Tinder, it forced you to use pictures you've used as Facebook profile pictures and showed your mutual friends in common.
If you limited your matches to people with at least one mutual friend, you probably wouldn't get any bots.
I appreciate your optimism.
Unless they can monetize on your nude photos, Facebook doesn't want to store them.
1. How to we get people to click on more ads?
2. How do we get more people laid?
Somehow I find this depressing, all that wasted talent.
Finder.
Like, Facebook meets Tinder.. but for finding companionship.
FB sign up limit is 13 years, no?
Bad move for users.
Despite what people think, Tinder (owned by MTCH) is not that dependent on Facebook, people can sign up through alternative means, and will probably continue to do so as their audience starts to bring in younger users over time.
Facebook is better off buying Tinder outright than attempting to roll its own platform. Sorry, as much as I believe in Facebook, some of their in house projects never seem to pan out the way people think, though they do get announced with a lot of fanfare.
I see a good entry point for new investors in MTCH in the coming days. I will be increasing my position.
That data isn't correct. Match has annual revenue of $1.33 billion. From Q4 2016 to Q4 2017, their revenue increased by $212 million, from $1.118 billion. In their most recent reported quarter, they did $379m in revenue.
Match did $803m in revenue for fiscal 2013 for contrast. Their growth has been modest and consistent over time.
Eitherway, I’m still optimistic and wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook bought out Tinder at some point.
Kind of surprising it took this long.
They did explicitly state that they want to promote 'relationships' not 'hook-ups' so I guess that is the easiest way to achieve that. Maybe they'll add new relationship status descriptions if people complain.
Quite the opposite, the more people you are seeing romantically, the more likely you are married to at least one of them.