People generally don't expect a company as big as Facebook to fail in any of its products and creations. But, this isn't true! Many prominent companies have been seen to give many failures throughout their journey. Among these, Facebook has experienced some pretty bad failures.
Facebook has always been upfront when it comes to developing something. But very few know that in the initial days, Facebook failed in various aspects. Several creations by Facebook were either criticized roughly or just didn't work for the general user. Some of the products were seen violating the user's privacy and net neutrality.
In fact, there were times when Facebook was criticized badly in the US and Europe for some of its monetized services which later came out as an utter failure. In this article, we will be discussing some of the major failures of Facebook. Let's get started!
Poke
Parse
Beacon
Facebook Credits
Creative Labs
Sponsored Stories
FAQ
Poke
A Facebook application similar to the very famous Snapchat, Poke, came out by the end of 2012. In the beginning, it was pretty popular as it was an exact copy of the of Snapchat- that was the disappearing of photos and texts.
In an interview, Mark Zuckerberg said that Poke was entirely built by a few coders within the time of 12 days. It was developed as a part of a hackathon, which is a marathon coding session. Later, Poke was called on as a joke as compared to other prominent Facebook products. To date, Poke is considered one of the biggest failures of Facebook.
Parse
In 2013, Facebook bought a mobile development platform called Parse. Facebook was pretty sure about running Parse and taking it to great heights. In fact, at the time when Facebook purchased the company, it was doing pretty well and had some really big clients. But when Facebook purchased it, it didn't come out as it was expected to. Facebook shut down Parse, referring to reasons that it would prioritize more on the major important products.
Beacon
Another majorly failed Facebook product was Beacon, which came out in 2007. It was basically a tracking program that contained around 50 Facebook users' activities and purchases on different websites. Beacon then posted the purchase of the user to its News Feeds without the consent of the users.
As Beacon came into force, thousands of Facebook users filed petitions to remove the program. After this, around a month later, Facebook finally dropped out of the tracking program- Beacon from its functioning.
Later on, Mark Zuckerberg apologized for this bizarre creation to its users and promised to do better in the future.
Facebook Credits
Facebook developed a different sort of shopping application in which users can shop with the credits they earned by playing games like Farmville. This was entirely for customers' fun and benefits. But this came out as a disaster as the user couldn't understand the process. Facebook credits ultimately shut down because of their complicated functioning and process.
Creative Labs
In 2013, Facebook came up with a new product- Creative Labs, which was created to encourage the designers as well as developers to develop more innovative and unique mobile apps. But it turned out the opposite. In fact, because of this only, Facebook faced two major failures of Paper, which was a new reading app and second, Slingshot (second failed to try to duplicate Snapchat).
Creative Labs produced most of the failed apps of Facebook. The main cause of low overhead and if it had continued, it would have caused more failures for Facebook.
Sponsored Stories
Sponsored Stories is one of the most complicated and controversial products of Facebook. As soon as it launched, it was banned because it may have to misuse threats and risks. But later on, it was brought back with the same modified features and guidelines.
Conclusion
Facebook is known as one of the most successful social media platforms. It has tons of amazing features and services that totally charm the users in great aspects. But in the initial days, it faced lots of criticism and failures with its unusual yet innovative products development. Although the ideas were pretty good in most cases, it was enough to hold onto the audience.
Hope this article made some clear points on the failed Facebook products. Stay tuned for more such articles!
FAQ
What are some of the failed Facebook products?
Beacon, Sponsored Stories, Creative Labs, and Facebook Credits are some of the failed Facebook products.
What are some of the companies owned by Facebook?
Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are some of the Facebook owned companies.
Author: Pratyusha Srivastava
Source : https://startuptalky.com/facebook-failed-products/
Date : 2021-11-18T06:56:38.000Z