Facebook likes to experiment with new ideas, but after the initial excitement of projects like Slingshot, Paper and others, one barely hesitates to call them failures. The same is true of Instagram’s Hyperlapse app, which garnered a lot of attention and was used by some notable brands (check out our favorites), but now only 6 weeks post-launch has sadly gone the way of the Poke app.
So what is it about Facebook’s ambitious but ultimately abyssmal app experiments? Are they too segmented? Is creating a separate app the wrong thing to do? Did the idea just not have as much staying power? After all, short-form video apps are hot right now (Vine, Snapchat), so why did this flunk?
With new apps and content to pay attention to every day it seems, perhaps on mobile we are becoming spoiled by novelty and Hyperlapse’s 15 seconds literally wore out.
Facebook is not so concerned. “We aren’t focused on downloads and App Store rankings right now,” said a Facebook spokesperson to VentureBeat. Hyperlapse was merely a side project of Facebook’s engineers working on nights and weekends and moreover, Facebook “never expected it to be an everyday app for the mainstream.”
