Facebook announced this week it would imminently shut down three apps, including tbh, which it bought less than a year ago.
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| Facebook will shut down three apps it owns. A woman holds a smart phone with the icons for the social networking apps Facebook, Instagram and others seen on the screen in Moscow on March 23, 2018. Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images |
By Alex Perry, International Business Times
Like any other huge corporation, Facebook occasionally acquires other, smaller companies in the hopes of getting something out of them. Also like any other huge corporation, Facebook sometimes abandons those companies shortly thereafter without doing much with what they had to offer.
[post_ads]Mark Zuckerberg’s social network announced Monday that it would kill off three of its spinoff projects, citing low user numbers. Within the next few weeks, users of the apps Hello, Moves and tbh will have to say goodbye and figure out alternatives, according to Facebook’s Monday news release.
All three apps will have their user data erased from existence within 90 days, according to Facebook. The only one of the three apps to shut down that is remotely surprising is tbh, given how recently Facebook bought it and how popular it seemed like it might be when it launched.
The app officially launched last August, and Facebook bought it for less than $100 million in October, according to TechCrunch. The idea for tbh was simple: Give teens a way to be nice to each other, anonymously by default and not anonymously if they so chose. Kids could add their friends on the app, which would then generate multiple-choice polls about them with questions like “Who has the best smile?”
If they wanted, respondents could reveal their identities to those they complimented. It was downloaded five million times in its first couple months of existence, but usage faded over time. At the time of writing, it is ranked 200th in the “social networking” category on the iOS App Store.
A forcefully positive alternative to something like Yik Yak may have been admirable, but it clearly did not move the needle enough for Facebook over time.
The other two app shutdowns are slightly more understandable. Hello was a way for Android users in Nigeria, Brazil and the United States to link up their Facebook accounts with their phones’ contact lists. Facebook launched the app in 2015.
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Moves, on the other hand, was a typical fitness tracking app that Facebook bought in 2014. Neither Hello nor Move had been updated in more than a year, according to The Verge. That usually spells doom for any mobile app.
“We know some people are still using these apps and will be disappointed — and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support,” Facebook’s statement said. “But we need to prioritize our work so we don’t spread ourselves too thin.”
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