Will Facebook's Secret Crush end the unbearable pain of unrequited love?

Mark Zuckerberg seems to have landed on a solution to turn around his untrustworthy and “not quite human” public image: playing Cupid.

Harking back to its humble beginnings as a tool for ranking strangers’ attractiveness, Facebook has announced a new feature called Secret Crush, wherein users select the friends for whom they carry a torch. If your crush adds you to their list – and with up to nine picks allowed, your odds aren’t bad – Facebook will reveal you to each other and love will assuredly bloom. But if the feeling is not reciprocated, they need never know your identity – just that one of their friends has added them as “a secret crush”.

It is, for sure, a more welcome notification than “It is [former colleague]’s birthday today. Send him good thoughts!” or “You have seven unopened saves this week”. But for now the feature – announced at the platform’s annual F8 conference on Tuesday, and first reported by Wired – is limited to users of Facebook Dating, which is yet to be rolled out globally. (As of today, it is available in 19 countries, mostly in Asia and South America; the UK and the US are not among them.)

According to reports, Facebook Dating works to connect users with people in their outer networks. Users create a dating profile that is separate to, but integrated with their main Facebook presence, visible only to non-friends who have also opted in to Dating. There is no swiping – instead, potential matches are suggested on a basis of dating preferences and shared interests and events. Otherwise, it’s not dissimilar to popular dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge and Bumble.

Where Facebook outstrips them all is in number of users – 2.4 billion actively monthly, as of 30 March; by comparison, Tinder has about 3.8 million – and the volume of data it has on them to inform a match: the two metrics by which a dating platform takes off, or fails. Perhaps tellingly, shares for Match Group Inc (which owns Match.com, Tinder and OKCupid) fell by 22% after Zuckerberg announced Facebook Dating in May last year.

By the sheer size of its network, Facebook has the potential to radically shake up online dating – and Secret Crush shows how. Dating apps introduce you to strangers, but Secret Crush could connect you with someone you already know you fancy. At the moment, your best bet is to download Tinder and cross your fingers that they cross your screen. Or you could always, you know, try telling them in person.