A scoop from CNET today says that Facebook will begin shutting down Moments on February 25 — an app launched to help simplify photo sharing between friends. Initially launched in 2015, the failing service saw exceedingly low usage by users, with data pointing to just 80,000 downloads in the previous month.
Facebook’s Moments app, launched last summer, makes it easier to share photos with your friends by using both location data and face-recognition to identify which friends were with you when the photos were taken. The latest version of the app now lets you include videos too – but it can’t yet recognize faces in those, so you’ll have to add them manually.
Facebook has today unveiled a new app called Moments from its Creative Labs division that makes it easier to exchange pictures amongst friends who were together at an event or place, all documenting it through their own photos. Here’s how Facebook describes the problem they’re solving:
It’s hard to get the photos your friends have taken of you, and everyone always insists on taking that same group shot with multiple phones to ensure they get a copy. Even if you do end up getting some of your friends’ photos, it’s difficult to keep them all organized in one place on your phone.
Through the use of location and facial-recognition data (both areas where Facebook has invested heavily), Moments groups photos together and then asks if you’d like to share them with the people it has recognized, and vice-versa. It’s very reminiscent of the now-defunct Color, although that app was more real-time and ephemeral (Moments allows you to collect and sync photos with friends after an event is over), and wasn’t integrated closely with Facebook’s 1 billion plus user base.
https://vimeo.com/130380325
It’s available now in the iOS App Store and on Google Play, which is useful in the event that some of your friends are on Android (gasp, I know).
