Where you one of the few that made use of Facebook moments? Did you find the app interesting and use it to share your photos on various networks? It sounds like your luck is unfortunately out as Facebook has announced on a CNET interview that it’s shutting down the Moments app on February 25th, partly because there weren’t enough people using it.

What was Moments?

It was developed as “a private way to give photos to friends and get the photos you didn’t take”. Moments was a quick, easy way to gather the photos you and friends take together. With Moments, you could give your photos to friends, get their photos, and keep them all in a single private place. Nonetheless, amid competition from many other apps, its developers ambition was never realised and it never really took off in the way it perhaps could have.  In fact, it appears most people didn’t even know it existed.

The genius behind it was meant to be the fact it used Facebook’s recognition system for your photos and hence if it identified any of your friends or contacts also using the app, it would prompt you to share your photos with them in similar way users tag their friends in  photos online who in turn receive a notification to perhaps share or like that photo.

What did Facebook say?

“We’re ending support for the Moments app, which we originally launched as a place for people to save their photos,” Rushabh Doshi, director of product management for Moments, said in a statement. “We know the photos people share are important to them so we will continue offering ways to save memories within the Facebook app.”

How can users save their current photos on the app?

Facebook said it wants to let people retrieve their photos from the app before it’s killed. Here’s how to do that: Starting Thursday, people will be able to go to a website Facebook has set up, where they can go through their photos and export them either to their computers or the camera rolls on their phones. That option will be available until May.

People can also upload their Moments photos to an album on Facebook’s main app. By default, the photos in those albums will be set so only you can see them.

Conclusively some may claim that Moments were good for as long as they lasted (not really otherwise users would have used the app) but it still magnifies a problem Facebook has been facing since its inception. Users are not embracing apps beyond its core offerings such as messenger and the odd scroll on their news feed (which surveys show has also declined steadily the past few years). Apps also created by Facebook in the past such as  Paper, Lifestage and acquired apps like tbh have all struggled to even take off and subsequently closed down in recent years usually due to low usage.

It is something Facebook is already  aware (hence the many apps frequently coming out) as it attempts to capture more of our time online and it remains to be seen what the next app developed will be and if it will have the same fate.

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