Facebook kills its little-known Notify app
The seventh-month-old app never quite took off.
Remember Facebook's Notify app? No? Well then, it has gone into the ether before you even knew it. The social network is shutting it down after launching it merely seven months ago. Notify was designed to send notifications from a curated list of news sources -- you could pick from its content partners, including Bloomberg Business, CNN and The New York Times -- to your lock screen. You could even follow specific parts of a publication, such as the sports section, instead of the whole thing. In a statement the social network sent out, it said that it'll begin integrating Notify's features into other products like Messenger on Wednesday. It will also pull Notify from the App Store.
We're guessing the company is talking about using Messenger's chatbots to deliver the latest updates to users. Some pubs like CNN and The Wall Street Journal are already running their own bots, and more companies will surely follow. Unlike Notify, chatbots don't need a standalone app, so all Facebook users can access them anytime.
Here are the full statement Facebook sent TechCrunch and the notice it blasted to subscribers' phones earlier:
"Starting on Wednesday, we will begin integrating Notify functionality into other Facebook products, like Messenger, and will be removing Notify from the App Store. Since launching Notify, we've learned a lot about how to make notifications as timely and relevant as possible and we heard from people using the app that Notify helped them stay informed about things they cared about throughout the day.
With more than 900 million people using Messenger each month, we think there is a great opportunity for publishers to reach even more people interested in real-time updates from their favorite sources."
