Facebook Moments was a good idea that never gained traction. Moments was a place to share photos to friends without uploading them to the core Facebook network. Think of to as Facebook’s answer to Flickr, Google Photos or Apple’s Photo Sharing. The company is killing it off as too few people are using it.
Rushabh Doshi, Facebook’s director of product management said in a statement that “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”.
The Moments app will be decommissioned in a month, on 25 February 2019. Until then, you can go to a website Facebook has created that allows you to export photos saved in Memories to your device or into a private album on Facebook that only you can see. That site will be open until May.
Users were informed of the shutdown by Facebook through email and an alert on the Moments app. People who have used the Moments app within the last year will also get a notification in the coming days when they open the main Facebook app.
While Facebook boasts over two billion users, Moments was installed by “just” 87 million people through Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store with the number of downloads declining to around 150,000 last month.
With Facebook navigating its worse year ever during 2018 as privacy scandals rocked the social media giant, I expect we will see peripheral projects like Moments fall by the wayside as the company focusses its efforts on rectifying the privacy issues that have dogged the company and rehabilitating its devastated reputation.
My guess is that with dwindling user numbers and limited engagement, Moments was always a candidate for euthanasia. I doubt Moments will be missed by many.