Another standalone app has been killed off by Facebook. The company announced today that it is shutting down Moments, a standalone app photo-sharing app it launched nearly four years ago, on February 25. The news was first reported by CNET.
According to CNET, Facebook shut down the app due to low usage. Facebook has created a website for users to export any photos they have on Moments to their phone or computer, or upload them as a private Facebook album. The company has begun alerting Moments users through the app and email, and next week anyone who has opened Moments in the past year will get a notification on Facebook.
“We’re ending support for the Moments app, which we originally launched as a place for people to save their photos. We know the photos people share are important to them so we will continue offering ways to save memories within the Facebook app,” Rushabh Doshi, Facebook director of product of product management, told VentureBeat in an email.
Moments used facial recognition and location to figure out which photos were part of the same events, then grouped them into albums. It was the brainchild of Facebook’s Creative Lab, which also created standalone apps like Slingshot and Poke. Both of those are now shuttered, one in a long line of apps from Facebook that have struggled to take off.
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When Facebook launched Moments four years ago, its now-ubiquitous photo-sharing app Instagram had just 400 million users. Now with more than 1 billion users, Instagram’s increased popularity has lessened the need for Facebook to devote resources into another photo app. The shuttering of Moments also comes at a time when users and lawmakers are expressing more concern about the amount of data Facebook collects on its users, as well as how it employs technology like facial recognition.
