Meta’s continuing its work of reformatting the NPE team, with yet another project having been shut down by the social media conglomerate.
The latest app to get the axe is Sparked, a dating app with the premise that users could hold four minute meetings with potential matches in the form of video chats. This would supposedly help them weed out potentially unwanted candidates, your creeps and whatnot. However, the premise never really managed to develop and audience to latch on to and therefore Meta decided to abandon Sparked in its entirety. As of yet, plans remain to integrate the platform’s features into Facebook Dating, and it was announced that Sparked would lose all project support on the 20th of January, 2021. However, this is far from being the first platform that Meta’ New Product Experimentation division seems to have bundled. In fact, Meta’s starting to develop a streak of starting and exterminating projects and applications that might even rival the Google Graveyard itself.
Screenshots via: TheVerge.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, for a roundup of all the projects that the NPE team started work on, and Meta axed faster than an especially enthusiastic lumberjack ever could. Let’s kick the list off with Super, which was supposed to be a copy of the Cameo platform. Celebrities could be hired to make short clips for adoring (and more importantly, paying) fans. The platform was quietly abandon with no fanfare, making us assume it was shut down. Then there’s Hotline, a social media platform that relied on the audio-rooms premise that Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces rely on. Also chopped up and left for the wolves. Forecast was a platform that could facilitate crowd-sourced predictions, but much like crowd-sourcing itself, the rickety, unreliable app bit the dust.
There’s CatchUp, which was meant to facilitate phone calls between friends (why did anyone think this was necessary, we already have phones), and has disappeared from the App Store. Collab was launched as a platform that musicians could partner up on and create content with, but has recently been announced to shut down on March. There’s Kit, which was meant to provide more messaging options to Apple Watch users, but is no longer available, although we could chalk that one down to Meta and Apple loathing each other’s guts. There’s AUX, meant to be an app that could foster DJs and it also got taken down. Hobbi was a Pinterest rip-off that absolutely no one liked better than the original thing, and got shelved for the better.
In fact, of the thirteen applications that the NPE has launched since November, 2019, only a grand total of two are standing. There’s Bars, which is meant to be a platform for people looking to make raps, and Tuned, which is a messaging app for couples. If history is anything to go by, I don’t see either of these platforms making it much further.
Read next: FTC given a second chance by the court to reapply for trials against Facebook
The latest app to get the axe is Sparked, a dating app with the premise that users could hold four minute meetings with potential matches in the form of video chats. This would supposedly help them weed out potentially unwanted candidates, your creeps and whatnot. However, the premise never really managed to develop and audience to latch on to and therefore Meta decided to abandon Sparked in its entirety. As of yet, plans remain to integrate the platform’s features into Facebook Dating, and it was announced that Sparked would lose all project support on the 20th of January, 2021. However, this is far from being the first platform that Meta’ New Product Experimentation division seems to have bundled. In fact, Meta’s starting to develop a streak of starting and exterminating projects and applications that might even rival the Google Graveyard itself.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, for a roundup of all the projects that the NPE team started work on, and Meta axed faster than an especially enthusiastic lumberjack ever could. Let’s kick the list off with Super, which was supposed to be a copy of the Cameo platform. Celebrities could be hired to make short clips for adoring (and more importantly, paying) fans. The platform was quietly abandon with no fanfare, making us assume it was shut down. Then there’s Hotline, a social media platform that relied on the audio-rooms premise that Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces rely on. Also chopped up and left for the wolves. Forecast was a platform that could facilitate crowd-sourced predictions, but much like crowd-sourcing itself, the rickety, unreliable app bit the dust.
There’s CatchUp, which was meant to facilitate phone calls between friends (why did anyone think this was necessary, we already have phones), and has disappeared from the App Store. Collab was launched as a platform that musicians could partner up on and create content with, but has recently been announced to shut down on March. There’s Kit, which was meant to provide more messaging options to Apple Watch users, but is no longer available, although we could chalk that one down to Meta and Apple loathing each other’s guts. There’s AUX, meant to be an app that could foster DJs and it also got taken down. Hobbi was a Pinterest rip-off that absolutely no one liked better than the original thing, and got shelved for the better.
In fact, of the thirteen applications that the NPE has launched since November, 2019, only a grand total of two are standing. There’s Bars, which is meant to be a platform for people looking to make raps, and Tuned, which is a messaging app for couples. If history is anything to go by, I don’t see either of these platforms making it much further.
Read next: FTC given a second chance by the court to reapply for trials against Facebook