Facebook has repeatedly failed in providing advanced privacy settings that lets the user share their intimate moments with a particular set of friends and family. It’s gawky and confusing and literally blast News Feed updates to everyone. However, Facebook is now taking an initiative to address this issue and is working on building a new app codenamed as “Moments”. This app is being developed to make this facility of micro-sharing much easier.
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The product is currently being tested by Facebook employees. Also, the current design features a grid with a few tiles, each of which represents one set of close friends and family. Users just need to tap on one of these to quickly share the files with them and just them. The basic aim of this app is to make selective sharing much rapid than the main Facebook app.
When asked from Facebook about its app, it said:
“We do not comment on rumors or speculation.”But the app does exist, as the sources say.
Moments will greatly help people who accidentally share their status with either too many or too few people as they don’t understand Facebook’s privacy settings. It will also help those who don’t share regularly or censor themselves, basically because they don’t desire to broadcast their life updates to all of their friends or acquaintances. Moreover, there are many people who switch to private messaging for close sharing. This app can prove beneficial to these users too.
Mark Zuckerberg, in 2010, announced that only 5% of the total users used Friend Lists, suggesting that it hadn’t found any design that created more specific privacy controls comprehensible.
In an effort to correct that, in 2011, Facebook revamped its Friend Lists, creating separate lists for family, colleagues, local friends, acquaintances, and Close Friends. It’s likely that you will see some of these lists in “Moments”.
As of now, it can’t be said for sure that Moments will be integrated with Facebook Groups, but as there are over 500 million people using them, a standalone app could make posting to them much simpler and faster.
When asked last year about standalone apps, Zuckerberg gave a hint in his statement about unbundling of Groups. He said that having something like Groups is always going to be second class in the main app and to make things really reach to their full potential, they need to create more specific experiences.
So, instead of having to access the main Facebook app, then click More, and then scroll down to find the option for group you want to post to, it’s possible that Moments may give you a much faster access.
Moments should remind you of a similar app: Path. It is also aimed on a similar concept of sharing to a specific set of people like your close friends and family. But the app’s model of defining a completely new social graph from the beginning hasn’t won it much popularity in the U.S. Path’s userbase was focused around the early adopters and Silicon Valley types and so it was greatly missing the people most of us like to share our intimate moments with; for instance, when we go to sleep. As soon as you accept requests from lesser known people, sharing sensitive stuff on Path gets a lot riskier.
As opposed to Path, Moments would be easier to use because it merely requires you to select the subsets from the friends you already have on Facebook.
Moments holds a big potential for Facebook, but it will have to provide obvious and instant value that is far beyond the main Facebook app to get really big. Though, at the same time, it can also be envisaged that even if it does not gain widespread popularity, motivating more frequent sharing is immensely valuable to Facebook regardless of the scale.
Adoption will be a real battle for Facebook, as many regard it to be careless about the privacy of its users. Worst-case scenario suggests that it may flop, and Facebook will keep on experimenting. But if Moments get successful, it can bring about revolutionary changes in the online presence of individuals and how do other perceive them.
