Facebook just released an app called Moments that’s designed to help you share photos from particular events with the people who were there with you. It’s a great idea — so why can’t it just be part of Facebook?
When you fire up Moments, it shows you events batched together by event as determined by the time-specific metadata of your photos. In the event that it recognises someone in your photos, it will suggest you share that image with them. If it doesn’t recognise anyone, you can still manually add them from your friends. The app — which is available for Android and iOS — is pretty straightforward, and actually quite useful.
What’s a little annoying is that it’s yet another app that you need to download from Facebook. The company just keeps fragmenting its service. “Unbundling,” as we jerks in the tech punditry like to call it, makes a certain amount of sense, but man, it’s freaking annoying. Just consider what happens in this case: If the person you’re attempting to share photos with in Moments doesn’t have the app installed, it sends a preview to Messages — yet another Facebook app. If they wanna see the photos, though, they’re gonna have to get their Moments on.
In fairness, this is a lot like Google’s own strategy: Just today I’ve used Gmail, Hangouts, Chrome, Google Now and Google Photos. It’s as if Facebook wants to build its own mobile OS. Oh wait — they already tried that with Home, which flopped spectacularly. Check out Moments for yourself on Android or iOS.