Mobile dating app Bumble is taking on LinkedIn
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Your support makes all the difference.The mobile dating app Bumble is expanding its services to include professional networking with a brand new section called BumbleBizz.
When it’s launched later this year, BumbleBizz will aim to help its users form new business connections. Though it’ll keep the same swipe mechanic that mobile dating apps like Bumble and Tinder have become so well-known for, users will be able to set up a new professional profile that will be kept seperate to the one they use for dating.
This new profile will be tailored around your career and accomplishments, bringing people together based on what field of work they’re in and their geographical location.
Things like gender won’t be taken into account when matching people up, but Bumble does intend to keep its rule that women must be the ones to initiate contact after a match is made. Keeping this feature could court controversy but considering sexist messages on LinkedIn have been called out in the past, it makes the app a viable and safe alternative for professional women who have become wary of the traditional networking process.
Though it’s being described as a competitor to LinkedIn, where LinkedIn offers users the opportunity to build up a professional network over time and search for new jobs, BumbleBizz will be more about bringing people together and making connections quickly. Whitney Wolfe, the founder and CEO of Bumble, says it will be a more casual and immediate alternative to LinkedIn, telling TIME “It drives immediate behavior, and I think immediate behavior is a really powerful thing.”
This isn’t the first extension of Bumble which makes it clear it wants to break out and become more of a social and lifestyle network than remain a simple dating app – recently it also tried to bring people together platonically with a function called BumbleBFF for finding friends that launched earlier this year.
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