Tech Brief: Facebook Begins Internal Testing of its Dating Layer

Facebook, which recently lost as much as US$ 120 billion in market value (the largest decline in 24 hours for any publicly traded company listed in the U.S. stock market) amid slowing growth and never-ending privacy scandals, has begun testing dating features it announced two months ago at its F8 annual developers conference, according to app researcher and reverse-engineer Jane Manchun Wong. In addition to asking employees to test the features by filling in dummy data to complete their dating profiles, a popup message warns them that "this is not meant for dating your coworkers." Facebook dating, if and whenever it chooses to make them public, could immediately have an outsized impact on other online dating services, including OkCupid and Tinder, whose parent company Match Group saw its stock plunge 17% the day the announcement was made back in May.