You Might Finally Have a Chance to Know If Your Crush Likes You; Thank Facebook!

Facebook finally is rolling out a service that fulfills its goals made when it was first conceived: to find you your one true love. Well, maybe not one true love, but someone who likes you and wants to spend some time with you. And what is the service called? It’s called Facebook Dating (I wish this naming could be better).

Facebook dating is not a new service. It was announced exactly a year ago in Facebook’s F8 conference. After that, no one paid particular attention to this service as Facebook was only making it available in 5 countries at the time. Now, in this year’s F8 conference, Facebook announced that the service would be expanding to 14 more countries this year.

What’s more? They have introduced a new feature called a Secret Crush. This helps to match with someone you like and want to have a relationship with inside your friend circle. With this feature, users can select up to nine Facebook friends who they like and want to be more than friends.

These are, what Facebook calls them, your crush. Now, if anyone of your crush is also available on Facebook dating, they will get a notification saying that someone has a crush on them. But Facebook won’t reveal the identity of the person that has a crush on them. It will just say that they are liked by some people. If they include your name when creating their list of 9 crushes, only then will Facebook will announce that you two have matched. This is very similar to how tinder works.

I think Facebook’s Dating product Manager, Charmaine Hung, explains the usefulness of this service better than me. She says, “I have 2,000 Facebook friends. I’m not best friends with all 2,000 people, and there’s a good chance that one of that could be a really good match with me. I trust them, I appreciate them and I know we’re compatible. The only thing missing is knowing if we’re both interested in being more than just friends without the fear of rejection if you were to do this in real life.”

To use Facebook dating, you have to opt-in to the service. You can then browse Events and Groups you are a part of for potential matches. You can then send a text-only message to a person you find interesting. This message will go to a special Dating inbox. And if the person you sent your text to reciprocates, you can then do whatever you want.

The best part here is that this feature is opt-in. So, you are only seeing people who want to meet new people and are, like you, in need of company or just some fun time.

Currently, Facebook dating is available in Colombia, Thailand, Canada, Argentina, and Mexico. Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Dating has been expanded to expanding to 14 new countries: Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana, and Suriname.