Buckle up: Partiful is the new Tinder

• A new way to flirt just dropped.
• Partiful wants you to shoot your shot in the RSVPs.
• The party invite app recently launched a tool called "Crush" that lets people match with mutuals.

A notification pops up on your phone screen: "Someone has a crush on you!"

No, it's not Cupid. It's not Tinder, either. It's Partiful.

The event invite platform has been rolling out a new feature called "Crush" that tells you if you have a secret admirer.

Genius? Maybe. A slippery slope? Definitely.

"You can select any of your Mutuals to crush, and they'll receive a notification that someone Crushed them!" Partiful explains on its website. "They won't be told who Crushed them, but the notification will tell them the last event that you attended together."

If the crush is mutual, you'll get a notification affirming your feelings and letting you know that the person "has a crush on you too!" — prompting you to "Say hi" in the app's direct messaging feature.

Yes, this does sound an awful lot like Tinder, sans the swiping.

There's really only one boundary: You have a limit of 10 crushes a month.

Partiful began rolling out the Crush feature at the end of December for a select number of US markets and will expand it leading up to Valentine's Day.

If you're surprised that Partiful has become a dating app, you shouldn't be. Any app with a messaging interface opens up the door to sliding into someone's DMs. Instagram? That's become a dating app. LinkedIn? People are finding love there, too.

"We built Crush because we know that meeting someone in real life is still something we all want, arguably more than ever," Partiful cofounder Shreya Murthy told Business Insider. "But the problem today is the lack of follow-through: you meet someone at a party, you feel a spark, and then nothing happens because reaching out feels too intimidating or high stakes."

Partiful's flirtation with social networking

As Partiful continues to cement itself as the de facto invite tool for young Americans, it's quietly staking a bigger claim as a social network.

"From day one, it felt like Partiful was clearly a social network hiding in plain sight," said TJ Taylor, a venture capitalist who previously held posts at dating app Raya and photo app Dispo.

Since its launch in 2020, the platform has introduced several social features that go beyond its original product of invites.

In some ways, the app has become the new Facebook — and not because it's come for Facebook's Events feature. Partiful now lets you see people's profiles and who your mutuals are, and dump photos from events. It also introduced a feed of events your mutuals are RSVPing to, and added a "boop" tool that is eerily similar to Facebook's "poke."

"More broadly, Partiful's mission is to help people build a vibrant social life offline: making friends, finding community, meeting new people," Murthy said. "Dating is one dimension of that, so it makes sense for it to be one dimension of Partiful as part of our broader ecosystem."

Will Partiful take its foray into dating a step further with matchmaking? How about suggesting you should talk to a certain someone at the next party you're attending?

Regardless, Partiful's new feature arrives just in time as modern dating hits a crossroad. While some dating apps are turning to futuristic ideas for applying AI, Taylor sees promise in apps helping people find love in ways we're already used to.

"We're doing a full throwback to what humans naturally did early on," he said, "where you would meet a potential significant other, potential spouse, at a communal event, at a party, at a bar."