Friendship

Image: Bumble

Bumble For Friends, the signature dating app’s standalone app that focuses on helping people find friends, has debuted new AI-based features.

The app announced one new feature dubbed “Plans” which helps users organize a meet-up in real life, and lets them invite up to 15 people. They can create public or private plans from the app, according to Tech Crunch, but the private plans require the planner to send invitations to specific members in their network.

The feature resembles the MeetUp app, where you can organize an event and invite members of your group to attend. Bumble offers options to grab coffee, eat out, do a workout together, “something outdoors” or a night out. Then you can make it public or private, and the last step is choosing the friends from your Bumble network to invite.

Bumble’s founder and longtime CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd will step down from the helm, and Lidiane Jones, the CEO of workplace messaging tool Slack will take over in January. Herd will move to Executive Chair of the company.

The news comes as Bumble’s stock price has fallen over 80 percent since it went public two years ago (from $76 to below $14). The dating app is not alone. Match Group is also going through a rough period, thanks to inflation and other economic concerns. Members are dropping their subscriptions and not using paid services on the apps, causing a decline in revenue the last few quarters.

Herd supported Jones in a statement: “This move to Executive Chair gives me the ability to step forward into a new and exciting role, get back to my founder roots and bring immense passion and focus to this next chapter of growth,” According to CNN, Wolfe Herd also added that she and Jones would be “fantastic partners.”

Image: bumble

Bumble for Friends, the new standalone app for finding friends from dating app Bumble, has partnered with holiday turkey brand Butterball to bring people together this holiday season.

The new partnership initiative called “Find Your Table” features a series of Friendsgiving events and some resources to help people make new connections ahead of the holiday season. The purpose, according to the joint press release, is to “help people make new connections and discover the joy and ease of gathering with friends and family, over turkey, this holiday season.”

The in-person event launches Thursday, November 2nd at 6:00pm EST in New York City, and will feature friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, No More Lonely Friends founder Marissa Meizz and Dinner with Friends Founder Anita Michaud, along with reps from Butterball, according to the release. They will conduct holiday tastings as well as help to connect people.

Bumble is testing its BFF (Bumble for Friends) service as a standalone app for finding friends, according to Mashable.

Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz (for career networking) have been features on the main Bumble dating app for a long time, and now Bumble intends to spin BFF off into its own entity. The new app is being tested in the UK and select Asian markets, according to confirmation from Bumble. And according to Tech Crunch, though Bumble couldn’t confirm specific countries where it’s being tested, the app is also available in Australia, New Zealand and Philippines for both Androids and iPhones.

Bumble BFF expected to launch in the U.S. this summer.

It’s likely that the dating app’s Bizz service will be a standalone app down the line as well. But for now, the company is focusing on its BFF service, since about 15 percent of Bumble’s active monthly users utilize the feature.

Dating app Bumble wants to extend its platform beyond dating and into social networking and virtual friendships through a new community feature – now dubbed “Hive.”

Hive is currently being tested, the company revealed in a recent earnings call with investors. While the company’s revenue projections have been lowered through the end of the year in part due to the app being pulled from Russia and the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is moving ahead on development projects.

Social networking has become an important part of Bumble’s growth strategy. Hive is in essence a revamping of its Bumble BFF friend-finding feature, and will offer things like group chat, polls and video calls to help people better connect over the app, according to Tech Crunch. The article pointed out that Hive focuses on helping people find “platonic connections through small communities.” In other words, Bumble is focusing on making the feature community-driven where people can drop in and out of conversations depending on their shared interests. 

Bumble is focusing beyond its popular dating app and adding a new social networking feature to its BFF platform.

Bumble BFF uses the same swipe-based matching found on the dating app, but will expand options for users to include networking groups where they can connect and chat with each other based on topics of interest, according to Tech Crunch. Bumble had hinted that it was testing this new feature and it was “doing well,” according to its first quarter earnings call.

While Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd didn’t offer many details about the new feature on the call, she did describe it was a way to help “people to discover and get to know each other around shared joys and common struggles.” She also noted that over 40 percent of “active BFF users” were checking out the new feature and the various networking groups, sharing that its one-month retention was more than 75 percent, according to Tech Crunch.