Facebook Moments

» see facebook.com/moments as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

moments was the kind of app the us press wrote about for two weeks and then forgot. to be honest, that was most facebook creative-labs output. i was on android in '15 and ankara at the time. for some reason facebook's experimental ios apps never landed on my screen with any urgency. anyway, the pitch was a private photo-sharing channel that used face recognition to sort your camera roll into piles per friend.

facebook shipped moments on june 15 '15. the app scanned your photos locally, matched faces against the public photos of your facebook friends, then said "looks like you have 23 photos of mark, want to send them to him". on the back end it was the same face-recognition stack that powered the news feed's photo tagging. on the front it was a private-share button bolted onto your camera roll. iphone and android, us app stores first, gradual rollout to most of the rest after that. EU was a different story.

i was not paying attention. honestly, neither was anyone else. EU regulators refused to let facebook ship the face-recognition feature in europe, which meant the entire pitch of the app was unavailable in half the world. in '16 facebook shipped a european version that just let you share albums manually, which was a folder feature ios already had. by '18 the daily active number had collapsed. facebook announced the shutdown on january 24 '19 and pulled the plug on february 25.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

this part i had to read about after the fact. moments solved a problem facebook had observed: people took photos of their friends at parties, those photos sat on one person's phone, the other people in them never got copies. moments said "let the face recognition fix that". technically it worked. you could send a pile of someone's face to that person in two taps. socially it was strange. people had not been asking facebook to scan their camera roll for them.

~ the slide ~

EU was the first crack. ireland's data protection commissioner refused the face-recognition opt-out model, so facebook shipped a stripped-down european version that nobody bothered to install. the second crack was that messenger and whatsapp already did photo sharing fine, and the people most likely to use a facebook private-share tool already had three or four other private-share tools open on the same phone. moments was a fifth option for a problem nobody had said out loud.

~ how it actually ended ~

the death notice went out by email on january 24 '19. facebook said the app was sunsetting on february 25 and gave users one month to export. the company did not bury the reason: the official statement said usage had dropped to the point that maintaining the app was not worth it. press coverage agreed and quoted internal estimates of about 80,000 downloads in the previous month, across both stores combined, which was rounding error for facebook.

the face-grouping engine survived. it kept running on the main facebook app's tagging suggestions until '21, when facebook shut that off too over the same EU pressure that had hobbled moments at launch. nothing replaced moments. people just kept airdropping photos around the table.

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