Facebook are really going all-in on new features at the moment, aren’t they? Around the same time they started testing the ability to share Instagram Stories directly to Facebook, some users started seeing some interesting popups.
Motherboard‘s Jacob Dubé received a message when he opened the app that read “[Name redacted] and 15 others may want to meet up with you this week.” He was shown photos of the friends in question and asked to choose whether or not he would actually like to meet up with them.
The other person would only be notified of his response if they both select “yes”, otherwise, they’ll never know. Hmmm, this all sounds frightfully familiar.
To be fair, there’s really no romantic connotations implied here and from what we’ve seen, only the folks on your friends list will pop up. Is it a handy way to keep in touch with your mates, or does Facebook want you to smang them? That’s really up to the user to interpret.
It’s obviously still in beta, so it won’t be accessible to everyone unless they decide to roll it out as a fully-fledged feature. It doesn’t look like it has hit Australia just yet, but some folks in New Zealand have seen it around.
“People often use Facebook to make plans with their friends,” Facebook told The Verge. “So, we’re running a very small test in the Facebook app to make that easier. We look forward to hearing people’s feedback.”
Whether or not the beta will be successful is unclear right now, but it’s an interesting test, I’ll give them that.
