Michal Marek Shortly after that Dropbox has announced the cancellation of its Mailbox and Carousel apps, Facebook is also coming with cuts. He is closing the special Creative Labs department and has already pulled some applications from the App Store that were created by creative teams within the company. Specifically, these are the Slingshot, Rooms, and Riff apps.
Facebook created its in-house "creative labs" to allow teams of creatives to work independently on other possible services, features and technologies related to Facebook's activities. Thanks to this, they had a much freer hand for experimentation than they would have when working on the main Facebook or Messenger applications.
People from Creative Labs tested new and new ways of interaction between users with a number of separate applications such as Paper, Slingshot, Mentions, Rooms, Facebook Groups, Riff, Hello or Moments, and several of their ideas were implemented directly into the main Facebook applications. WITH Paper applications moreover, independent teams have shown that they can take Facebook design to a truly admirable level.
However, some applications from the workshop of independent creatives inside Facebook were just the implementation of ideas eyed by the competition, or they were concepts without a future. Slingshot was more like that a failed copy of Snapchat, which allowed you to send a picture to a friend, which disappeared after a while, but in order for the friend to view it, he had to send another picture back first. Not surprisingly, the service was not well received. Another Snapchat feature called Stories then the folks at Creative Labs wanted to compete unsuccessfully with their own Riff apps.
These two apps have not received any updates for quite some time and now Facebook has canceled them. For the time being, the apps will continue to work for existing users, but no one else will download them from the App Store. There is also another application called Rooms, which tried to follow the tradition of classic Internet chat rooms. Users didn't hear much about it either, and were put off by the snag in the form of having to scan a QR code to access the given room.
The special "creative labs" were therefore disbanded, but according to Facebook, none of its employees were fired. In addition, Mark Zuckerberg's company says that work in small teams on separate applications will continue. Applications, for example, will continue to be supported Hyperlapse a layout.
