Facebook’s stated mission has long been “to bring the world closer together.” It’s kept far-flung friends in touch while reuniting lost ones. It’s worked to connect consumers with businesses while allowing co-workers to collaborate on projects.
But to date, Facebook has left the business of more intimate, romantic connections to apps like Tinder. Until recently, that is. Facebook said in May it would launch a dating app, and now there is a glimpse of what that app will look like.
Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher, discovered features of a Facebook dating app and posted screen shots on Twitter.
Facebook is internally testing Facebook Dating.
I can't go past the signup screen because they are not activating all non-employee Dating profiles because, well, it's "pre-launch" ;) pic.twitter.com/VQFHUJIkuX
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 3, 2018
“We are testing Facebook Dating internally (as we regularly do with new features), but we don’t have anything more to share right now,” Jillian Stefanki, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in an email to Fortune. Facebook hasn’t announced a release date for the dating app.
A screenshot from Wong’s tweet showed Facebook stressing to employees that the app in testing was only to be used for the development of software, not romance.
“This product is for US Facebook employees who have opted-in to dogfooding Facebook’s new dating product. The purpose for this dogfooding is to test the end-to-end product experience for bugs and confusing UI. This is not meant for dating your coworkers,” the screenshot read. “Dogfooding” is a term used by tech companies to refer to internal testing of a product before it’s released to the public.
It’s not clear yet whether this test will lead to a formal dating app from Facebook. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking a lot about increasing “time well spent” on its apps. And if Facebook can succeed in connecting people into long-term relationships, well, that’s a better use of time than passively reading misinformation that persists in Facebook’s News Feed.
Facebook first announced its dating app on May 1, during its annual F8 developer conference. On that day, Match Group—which owns Tinder, the dating app that according to Facebook’s own data dominates the dating-app space—saw it shares fall 17%. Match Group was down 0.45% Friday at $37.88 a share.
