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If you’ve been boo’d up during quarantine, we know how rough it gets. If you’ve been single during quarantine, we know how rough that gets too.
For the latter, Tinder has a new feature to help you get the face time you’ve so desperately been lacking the past couple of months while stuck inside because of the coronavirus pandemic. Today the company started rolling out its video chatting feature called Face To Face in 13 countries, including select parts of the US like Virginia, Illinois, Georgia, and Colorado, as well as in Australia, Brazil, and France. Not everyone in those places will get the feature, but a select few will.
Face To Face is dope because someone has to opt-in during the chat to get it working, so cold calls aren’t allowed. But if you had other plans of getting freaky during the video call, Tinder advises you to keep it PG since no nudity or sexual content and no references to hate speech, violence, or illegal activities are allowed. Unlike many other services like Duo or FaceTime, the screen is always split in half so you can see yourself just as large as the other person. So, you have no excuse to not master your angles or not see your messy living room in the background.
Source: Tinder / Tinder
“We intentionally did this split-screen, so you know exactly what you look like on the other person’s phone, so you can feel a little bit more comfortable,” Bernadette Morgan, senior product manager on Tinder’s trust and safety team tells The Verge. “And then also, we are hoping that it promotes conversation. By having an equal size, you can see the other person [and] they can see you, so hopefully it fosters conversations because conversations are a two-way street.”
Back in May, Tinder announced that the feature would be coming soon, and help people get some sort of human interaction during these scary times.
“This period of social isolation would have been much more dire for single people — who no longer have other avenues to meet and connect such as bars and concerts — if not for our products,” read a note in Tinder’s earnings report.
While you could always just exchange numbers with your potential new fling, its always safer to peep them on the app first, before swapping any personal information. Hopefully, Tinder’s Face To Face feature rolls out nationwide soon.
