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Facebook Dating feature enters employee testing, gets early reveal

By Adam Westlake/

Social media titan Facebook is known for "borrowing" from — or flat-out acquiring — it's largest rivals, including Snapchat and Twitter, and now it appears to be entering the territory of Tinder and OKCupid. Following its first announcement back in May, Facebook's dating service feature has entered an internal testing phase among employees, and a sneak peek has been revealed this weekend.

To be clear, Facebook Dating is not yet available to the public. However, Jane Manchun Wong, an independent app researcher, was able to dig through the Facebook app's source code and get an early look at how the feature works, sharing images on Twitter. Facebook has gone on to confirm that the service exists and is being testes, but did not share any other details.

For the internal testing phase, Facebook is asking its employees to create fake profiles on the service in order test the UI and check for bugs, with any data to be deleted before a public launch. "This is not meant for dating your coworkers," it says in one of Wong's screenshots.

Other details include that the dating feature will be found inside the main Facebook app, rather than being released as a standalone app. Once a user activates the feature their dating profile is kept separate from the main Facebook account, and it can only be found by others who have done the same. Any details shared with the dating profile won't be posted to the News Feed, and among the privacy settings are options to keep the dating profile hidden from friends and friends of friends.

Facebook hasn't made any mention of when it plans to release its dating feature to the public. And as it's still in testing, there's always the chance it may not be released at all, or that its look and features may change.

SOURCE Jane Manchun Wong/Twitter

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