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Moments by Facebook — A private way to share photos with friends
Syncing photos with the Moments app is a private way to give photos to friends and get the photos you didn’t take.
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Replies
@rrhoover We've been expecting this for a while, since the original TC article about it last year.
It's funny, because the video / pitch for moments is identical to what Cluster and a bunch of other apps (I've counted 70+ near-identical apps) have always pitched. They keep coming out because getting photos from other people continues to be an unsolved and compelling problem.
Facebook is in a great spot to solve this problem because of their reach. But the biggest challenge with Cluster has been getting people to download another app, so it's a shame Facebook users have to do that here. But the auto-facial recognition might be a carrot enough? I dont know.
Seems like another well designed creative labs app, but their other apps haven't instilled confidence in adoption. But we'll see. Private sharing is very very very very hard. And with our research, Facebook is seen as a great place to publicly, not privately share https://medium.com/@mulligan/for...
Looking forward to seeing how it does!
Hey @rrhoover, Sokratis here from Togethera. What you’re describing was one of they key motivations for building Togethera. We just wanted to make it really easy (easy enough for grandparents) to share photos and videos with the people that matter to you, without having to think about privacy at all. Moments seems well-designed, and the use case is definitely there. Curious to see how it takes off and if it can become habit forming.
@rrhoover I agree with @mulligan, I think the biggest obstacle to user adoption will be that the app doesn't work without your friends.
So any early adopter will have to convince their circle of friends to download the app to share photos privately.
And with previous apps released under creative labs, Facebook doesn't seem to have any post launch acquisition strategy apart from getting a ton of press when the apps are initially released or updated or drop out of the app store ranking.
Will be interesting to see this develop :)
@yelebademosi @rrhoover all that said, the onboarding of the app is really smart and i love the Private (my camera roll) vs Public (shared albums) distinction. And the way they prompt you to share photos. Some smart things that I wish we would have done when our app had more of this focus a few years ago.
Don't be fooled. Facebook Moments is *not* private sharing. It uses Facebook’s servers. It’s still a creeping, peeping middleman. Unless it uses true peer-to-peer, Facebook cannot honestly claim something is private.
I've been on Facebook for 10 years or so and shared more photos via Facebook ecosystem in 5m using this app than I did in the last 10 years.
Also, applying "inbox zero" concept to your camera roll is super clever.
Great article by one of the designers explaining how they went about designing Moments https://medium.com/facebook-desi...
@nikunj @alloralaura is too legit. even from our http://floktogether.com/ roots over 5 years ago. #sheepwithjetpacks
Intrigued. Keen to try. Small thing, but weird how the app screenshots use illustrations to represent photos. Feels a bit inaccurate, but I guess it's better than super polished SLR photos that you see in other Facebook app screenshots.
I really love the idea of private networks. It was my favorite thing about Path early on. I'm just skeptical that this can work under the Facebook brand. I think people have already created a mental model for how Facebook works and the idea of giving Facebook private data seems at least a little weird.
I wonder what the thinking is behind a US-only launch for an app like this? Can anyone shed some light on this decision?
@jamiemchale @rehatkat They did the same with Paper. It's *still* not available in the UK store :/
I've always found Facebook to be this strange place that everyone is on, even more then Twitter. So it's very unique for interesting experiments like this, because you don't have to worry about finding friends to test it with, because they're already there. Curious to see how this works. I'll give it a shot, I'm sure all my friends would like to see the photos I (don't) take! :P
"It’s hard to get the photos your friends have taken of you, and everyone always insists on taking that same group shot with multiple phones to ensure they get a copy. Even if you do end up getting some of your friends’ photos, it’s difficult to keep them all organized in one place on your phone."
I disagree with the premise of this app, at least for my own personal experience. Facebook has made it so easy to share pics with friends, that I don't find myself ever contacting friends asking for a group shot. And I don't ever feel pain in organizing photos thanks to Moments on iOS.
Sure, there's the special event scenario like a wedding, but that doesn't happen very often, and I don't think I want to use an special app for those situations.
Very impressive. I just tried it out and it seems to me that facial recognition is a big game changer here. It made the process of finding the right friends for a given group of photos very smooth.
Looks like when you sync moments with friends who don't yet have the app, they receive a preview in Facebook messenger. We'll see how well that works as a distribution channel for the app.
Smart move by Facebook. This addresses an entire category of startups trying to displace Facebook due to its broad friend model.
The timing of this couldn't be any more perfect, as I just got back from a trip to Half Dome with friends; this is the perfect use case to test out the app. However, I keep coming back to the same thought when I think about this app, and that is that it reminds me so much of Google's new Photos and Dropbox's Carousel.
I installed Moments on my Nexus 5, and my phone actually completely froze several times throughout the time the app was creating these "suggestions". Has anyone else experienced this?
I'd be interested to see how much this is influenced by Wechat Moments - private photo sharing for groups of friends that's been around for a few years now.
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