The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has forced people to limit their usual face-to-face social activities, triggering the use of Internet video communication platforms for a variety of purposes, including flirting.
In this regard, Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team is now bringing with it a new social application that moves familiar speed dating into the digital realm.
Sparked: Facebook’s new experimental video speed dating app
Sparked, as the application is called, calls for virtual meetings, where attendees will share four minutes with each person, according to their preferences about the type or types of people they want to contact, although at the moment the maximum number of people with whom each attendee will be put in contact in each call is unknown.
It is only known that if an attendee wants to know more about one of the people with whom they have been put in contact, or as seen from the application, they have had a good time together, both will be called for a second ten-minute appointment, where they will put, among other things, share their contact details, among other things they wish to communicate.
This new social app will have neither public profiles, nor direct messages, nor finger swipes, although you must have a Facebook user account to make use of it for free. For now, it only has a web-based version, and there is currently no application for Android and iOS.
Also, in the entry process, users must argue those reasons why they consider themselves to be nice people, arguments that will be reviewed by a person from Facebook before giving the go-ahead to be part of the application.
At the moment, Sparked is limited to a small group of users. For now, Facebook’s possible interest in this that will be its second dating application is unknown, having already Facebook Dating in its main application, launched in 2019 in the United States, expanding over time to other territories.
The truth is that Facebook Dating works like many other dating platforms, while Sparked’s approach takes advantage of the rise of video communications motivated by the limitation of social activities to offer a different dynamic.
Time will show Facebook’s interest in this new application, currently in the experimental phase, taking into account that the applications that are born under the NPE barely manage to graduate to become stable products of the company, so we do not know if Facebook will make a different decision that bets on Sparked or remain simply one more application that then goes unnoticed by the public given the limited attention.
