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Facebook Kills Creative Labs And Associated Apps

Facebook has reportedly shut down Creative Labs, a branch of the company that built a variety of standalone apps. At least some of those apps are also shutting down. Among the apps housed under the Cr...
Facebook Kills Creative Labs And Associated Apps
Written by Chris Crum
  • Facebook has reportedly shut down Creative Labs, a branch of the company that built a variety of standalone apps. At least some of those apps are also shutting down.

    Among the apps housed under the Creative Labs banner were Slingshot, Paper, Mentions, Rooms, Groups, Riff, Hello, and Moments. According to a report from CNET, Slingshot, Rooms, and Riff are closing up shop. The fate of the rest of these apps is unclear.

    Creative Labs was announced along with the Slingshot app, which quite frankly was just an absurd idea from the beginning. When it launched, it was an app that let you send images to people, but in order for the recipient to receive it, they first had to sending something in return. It really didn’t make a lot of sense, and apparently the team behind it eventually realized that this wasn’t an appealing way to communicate, and altered the functionality to make it a bit more sensible. Clearly it still wasn’t enough to get many on board.

    Rooms was a way to chat with people that you had to use a special QR code invitation to gain access to “rooms”. Another misfire.

    Riff was a video app described as a “creative tool” for making videos with friends.

    CNET shares comments from the company:

    A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the apps had been disappeared, noting they hadn’t been updated in some time.

    “Since their launches, we’ve incorporated elements of Slingshot, Riff and Rooms into the Facebook for iOS and Android apps,” she added.

    According to the report, Facebook will continue to experiment with new standalone apps. They just won’t be part of Creative Labs.

    Image via Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

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