Facebook doesn’t exactly need any more presence in the social media business, but that isn’t going to the stop the company from trying. As first reported by The Information, an experimental product team within Facebook recently released a Pinterest-style app called Hobbi.
The app’s description – it’s currently only available for iOS devices – says it’s meant to “capture and organize your creative process,”and “save photos of the projects you’re working on… whether it’s cooking, baking, DIY, arts & crafts, fitness or home decor.”
So yeah, Pinterest. Facebook proper offers some visual collection abilities through its ‘Save post’ feature – you can see your collections on facebook.com/saved – but it’s far from a primary use of the social network. Instagram is more suited to visual content and has a more robust collections feature, but it still lags behind Pinterest’s functionality.
Pinterest, for its part, seems unfazed. It told The Information that Hobbi doesn’t have its “discoverability, search, and recommendations.”
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The app was created by Facebook’s NPE Team (that is, New Product Experimentation team), which the company first revealed back in July. At the time, the company had this to say about the team:
NPE Team apps will be aligned with Facebook’s mission of giving people the power to build community but will focus on shipping entirely new experiences. We decided to use this separate brand name to help set the appropriate expectations with users that NPE Team apps will change very rapidly and will be shut down if we learn that they’re not useful to people.
In other words, there’s no guarantee Hobbi will stick around, and it’s current 1.9 star rating on the App Store probably doesn’t help. In November, we reported on another NPE app called Whale, meant to help you create memes. That app is no longer on the App Store.
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