Facebook Dating

The UI is just bad. You cannot browse profiles, you must say "yes" or "no" and the decision is final. If you scroll down to read a profile more, when you pass, it leaves you in the same scroll spot in the next profile. This is User Interface 101 level stuff. The list of problems goes on from there.

Everything about it says "throwaway add-on" that they haven't spent any real time on optimizing.

When originally announced, Match stock dropped 25% on the news, only to bounce back. I don't see this product really making a big dent in the Match bottom line.

Facebook gave me a notification to try FB Dating the other week. I clicked it, chose my pics, and was on the meat market immediately, receiving phone notifications like "Karen liked you" just like any other dating app. I click it, view their profile, and start messaging them. Being linked to Facebook profiles, I also have more trust in the other party which is how Tinder started out.

HN rants so consistently about dating apps that I think it's mostly just ranting about dating in general.

Facebook is ubiquitous in Mexico where I live. And when I go back to the States and meet people 20-35 downtown, I have yet to find people who aren't on Facebook. I think HNers vastly overestimate the exodus from Facebook, if there is one, just because we like to cover FB's privacy issues here on HN.

Facebook as a company has always been chasing after content. This is because content has a direct and clear monetization strategy whereas helping people make use of their network is difficult to make money from. Well, it shows - $40bn in revenue, 80% of it in ads.

Helping people to use their network effectively is basically charity work to Facebook. How are you going to at-scale monetize that out? The answer: you don't.

But with some irony, after chasing content for over a decade, I think Facebook is now in a position to do some charity work. Similar to Google, who saturated their ad team's return on value and has it's employees working on moonshots all day, Facebook can now afford to sit on their content engines and attack problem spaces that are harder to monetize and solve but provide more meaningful value.

Long story short, I think it's the right time for Facebook's hayday to sneak up on us because it can quietly focus on adding real value via our networks without chasing after money from them.

I really like the idea of Facebook Dating, because 1) it already has the network and doesn't need to build it, and 2) it doesn't need to make money.

Most dating apps suffer under the pressure to make money and grow. For a dating app to grow it has to focus on building cohesive user bases that find value in each other and eventually creates its own ecosystems that damages the experience for others (i.e. hookup culture). While Facebook Dating might still have some of that, I could see it ending up as a more serious dating platform because it doesn't need to focus on user growth.

How would you monetize Marketplace? Facebook Dating? The answer is: you don't care that much, throw some ads on it and let it cover costs. 7-8 years ago when people were searching for Facebook's killer money printing machine, these projects would have a lot of pressure to make a lot of money. Nowadays, sheltered by the content engine that Facebook has amassed, these projects can focus on providing immediate and strong value through Facebook's core benefit (it's network) and hold off on how to make money for a couple of years.

Sounds familiar? It sounds a lot like Gmail.

I see this being huge for older adults who are divorced or widowed, those are the people still using fb and I think would be happy to use this service.