Pune: Pune based start-up MTJF (More Than Just Friends) has filed a lawsuit against social media giant Facebook for copying their unique feature of dating among friends.

WHAT IS THE UNIQUE APP

MTJF, launched in February 2018 is a mobile dating app that facilitates dating among friends. MTJF’s unique feature helps users to secretly find out if their friends are interested in pursuing romantic relationships with them.
Sangram Kakad, Founder of MTJF reached out to Facebook to commercially exploit the idea. However, Facebook did not revert to Kakad and further launched the unique feature of MTJF in Facebook calling it as ’Secret Crush’, without any due credits to MTJF. However, Kakad had already filed an application for international patent for the unique feature of MTJF in November 2018.

According to Kakad, Facebook announced its dating feature in May 2018, when it specifically mentioned that the dating feature won’t be available for friends. Citing the reason for excluding friends from the Dating feature, Facebook said that "many people’s biggest fear is “are my friends and family going to see this?”. People who are already friends don’t need help meeting and may already know if they want to date each other.” However, upon learning MTJFs unique mechanism, Facebook incorporated the feature of dating among friends by exactly copying the mechanism of MTJF.

Founded in 2004, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg is accused of stealing the concept of social media site from Winklevoss Brothers. Since then, Facebook has been involved in several lawsuits.