Facebook to shut short-form content creation app Hobbi

San Francisco, July 1 (IANS): Facebook has reportedly decided to shut down its short-form content creation app Hobbi on July 10.

Hobbi took cues from Pinterest and let users organise photos in a visual diary of sorts.

The app first arrived on iOS in February from Facebook’s internal R&D group, the NPE Team.

“Hobbi users have now been notified by way of push notification that the app is shutting down on July 10, 2020. The app allows users to export their data from its settings,” reports TechCrunch.

Hobbi gained just 7,000 downloads on US App Store, according to data from Sensor Tower.

Facebook has said that its NPE Team keeps experimenting with apps and shut down those which do not get traction among the users.

Google has also joined the race to launch short-video making apps with unveiling Tangi which is focused on creativity and Do It Yourself (DIY) space. The app is a product from Google’s in-house incubator titled Area 120.

Unlike TikTok, Tangi wants people to learn new things.

Dom Hofmann, the co-founder of the now defunct six-second video platform Vine, has announced the release of its successor called Byte.

Instagram has launched a new video-music remix feature called ‘Reels’ and YouTube is testing ‘Shorts’.

In November last year, Facebook quietly released a stand-alone app called ‘Lasso’ to compete with TikTok.