Competition for Tinder? Popular Social Media Platform Wants to Include Dating
Facebook is still the largest social network in the world. However, there is one area where it plays no role whatsoever. Meta wants to change this and is relying on functions based on artificial intelligence to perform matchmaking in the future.
Whether Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, none of these social networks has yet been able to break Facebook's dominance. The platform, which, like Instagram, belongs to the Meta Group, has a market share of more than 62% in the USA. In Canada, whose inhabitants are among the most active users worldwide, this figure is as high as 77%.
The company has been relying on this degree of popularity since 2019 to continue innovating. With a separate presence from the actual profile, Facebook Dating is meant to make it easier for its users to find their next love—and also to steal a march on successful dating platforms such as Bumble, Grindr, and Tinder.
However, success has been limited so far. Even though the company claims that hundreds of thousands of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 create a new profile every month and that the number of matches has increased by ten percent compared to the previous year, the service has played only a minor role in its home market. Based on current statistics, Facebook Dating—despite the great popularity of Facebook itself—does not even rank in the top ten.
Intelligent Assistant Should Lead to Accurate Matches
Now, the company is making a new attempt and trying to outdo the competition in two areas. First, many users of dating platforms feel annoyed by the never-ending swiping required through profiles deemed suitable by the algorithm. Secondly, Meta has decided not to activate functions that go beyond the basic offering by hiding better features behind a paywall.
To this end, the dating section is being expanded to include two new functions that should lead to a higher hit rate when searching for a new partner. Once again, artificial intelligence will help with this endeavor. A specially developed voice assistant is meant to provide individual support in the search for a partner and should lead to significantly better matches, as it not only takes into account the classic aspects of a matching process. Instead, personal needs and wishes can also be incorporated into the prompts used to command the dating assistant.
However, Meta is not revealing any technical details yet. The company will, presumably, rely on one of the major language models (LLMs) developed in-house, such as Llama.
Meet Cute Delivers Matches without Intervention
The second function that will be added to Facebook Dating is called Meet Cute. This function intends to make classic dating easier overall: based on preferences defined in the profile, suitable candidates are suggested for a chat on the platform without further action. The user can then decide whether to follow up on the recommendation or reject it as unsuitable.
Initially, Meet Cute will present new suggestions once a week. Meta could increase the frequency in the future, but additional data on its efficacy and accuracy needs to be gathered first. Other functions are also set to follow. If you find this too much of a good thing, you can also disable the function.
