There’s a good chance you haven’t ever used Facebook‘s seven-month-old Notify app, so it probably won’t concern you too much that it is already being shut down.
Last November we reported the launch of Notify, an app that allowed users to set up news updates via push notifications from sites like CNN, The Weather Channel, or Fandango. Users would chose whichever news channels interested them and then receive curated notifications on their lock screens from selected publications. From there, stories and updates could be viewed, saved, or shared with friends.
We determined the not-so-original idea did “surprisingly little” so it is not all that shocking that the app didn’t even make it to its first birthday. Still, the features present in the app will find a new home somewhere in Facebook’s unthinkably popular Messenger app.
Notify’s functionality may eventually be duplicated via chatbots, a platform news organizations are beginning to use in order to send out updates. It’s like being in a messenger chat with a robot designed to cater to your notification needs. You can give it a shot here.
Notify may have failed, but its infrastructure could lead to the social network’s next big hit, so there is still hope that this experiment was just a rough draft for bigger, better things.
Here is a full statement from Facebook, via TechCrunch.
“Starting on Wednesday, we will begin integrating Notify functionality into other Facebook products, like Messenger, and will be removing Notify from the App Store. Since launching Notify, we’ve learned a lot about how to make notifications as timely and relevant as possible and we heard from people using the app that Notify helped them stay informed about things they cared about throughout the day.
With more than 900 million people using Messenger each month, we think there is a great opportunity for publishers to reach even more people interested in real-time updates from their favorite sources.”
H/T The Verge | Photo via Bhupinder Nayyar/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)