David Bridges
Highlights
- New Feature: Meta introduces a dating assistant to enhance matching based on user interests.
- Unique Prompts: Users can enter personalized search criteria like “Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech.”
- Meet Cute: A new feature connects users with surprise matches through an algorithm.
- Rising Usage: Daily conversations among young users aged 18 to 29 increased by 24% last year.
Meta’s announced some new updates for Facebook Dating, its own relationship connection tool, which it first launched back in 2019.
Yes, Facebook Dating is still a thing, and with more people looking to use the app to find a partner, especially (surprisingly) young people, Meta’s now looking to help people find the best matches based on their interests.
First off, Meta’s rolling out a new dating assistant, which will help you find more relevant matches in the app.
As explained by Meta:
“Dating assistant is a chat assistant within Facebook Dating that gives you personalized help on your dating journey. It can help you find better matches based on your interests and preferences, giving you refined search and custom match recommendations.”
Which sounds a little questionable, in that the assistant might be helping users craft messages, thus betraying who they actually are.
But that’s not the aim. As you can see in the above sequence, the assistant is primarily designed to help each user find more relevant matches based on their specific interests and notes.
“The assistant allows users to go beyond traditional traits like height or education, allowing you to enter unique prompts tailored to what you’re looking for. For example, you can write ‘Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech’ and the dating assistant will help you with your search.”
So while you can also use the assistant to “provide dating ideas or help you level up your profile,” it’s not intended to help users simulate an alternative personality, which could make them appear more interesting in the app.
But it can also do that, and that element, again, seems a little dicey, especially if you’re trying to find people that match your actual personality, not some AI-generated persona of what you want to be. But clearly Meta sees this as enhancement, not as misrepresentation. We’ll see what users think.
In addition to this, Meta’s also adding a new feature called “Meet Cute,” which will automatically connect you with a surprise match based on Meta’s “personalized matching algorithm.”
So if you don’t know what to add to your profile, Meta can do it for you, based on your profile info. Then it’ll just cut out the middle man and set you on a date with someone that the system thinks you’ll like.
It’s interesting to see Meta rolling out updates for Facebook Dating, given its relatively low profile within the app.
But according to research, usage of Facebook Dating has been rising.
As reported by Axios, daily conversations on Facebook Dating among users aged 18 to 29 increased 24% last year, while Meta says that:
“Hundreds of thousands of young adults (ages 18-29) in the U.S. and Canada create Facebook Dating profiles every month, and young adult matches are up 10% year over year.”
So, yes, a lot of people are finding prospective partners via Meta’s dating feature. Which does make sense, given the overall popularity and usage of Meta’s apps, and the data insights that it would have to correlate matches.
In any event, now you have more ways to find romantic partners on Facebook, while also simulating a more interesting personality to catfish unsuspecting users.
