Facebook has very quietly launched a new app called Hobbi, influenced by the Pinterest platform. If successful, Facebook would have an answer to one of the most ubiquitous apps in the world.
Pinterest appeals to a massive audience, attracting over 250 million monthly users, which puts it just behind Twitter in popularity. Despite it doing social media numbers, its biggest strength is in the ways it blends concepts of other platforms. The idea of having each user design boards with their pins, takes the focus off of simply communicating (and arguing), while the process of discovering pins still grants users the socially connected feeling.
It's perhaps for these reasons that Facebook is experimenting with Hobbi in some markets. Tech Crunch reports the app is only available in Belgium, Colombia, Spain, Ukraine, and the US. It isn't an exact copy of Pinterest, in that it's very light on social features. Hobbi instead focuses on the personal organization side of things, encouraging users to capture their projects and edit those photos and videos into collections. Sharing said collections takes a back seat to the actual curation and tracking of a user's progress, so if it is indeed a way to pursue Pinterest, it's leaving a lot of room for improvement.
What Are Hobbi's Odds of Success
It's very important to note Hobbi is part of Facebook's NPE (New Product Experimentation) Team, responsible for other smaller projects. The company takes the "E" for "Experimentation" quite literally, stating they want to "set the appropriate expectations with people that, unlike Facebook’s family of apps, NPE Team apps will change very rapidly and will be shut down if we learn that they’re not useful to people." There's an argument to be made that with a more direct marketing push from Facebook, Hobbi could rise to become a legitimate challenger to Pinterest. Alternatively, with the generally negative public perception the company has garnered recently, attaching the Facebook brand to such an unoriginal idea would likely lead to harsh criticism from the online community.
The Facebook NPE team has produced three additional apps in the last year. Whale, an app for creating and editing memes, has already shut down. Aux and Bump are still currently available. Aux is a music management app aimed at creating party playlists. Bump is a social app for finding people nearby, with a focus on chatting and dating. Both are still considered to be in a beta test stage, and neither has reached a level of significant relevance at this time. It's clear, however, that the NPE apps are based on some interpretation of how social media users prefer to interact on other platforms. Twitter and Snapchat are great examples of apps which built their success on doing fewer things than their larger competitors, but with a more refined execution.
Hobbi is currently available in the US on the iOS App Store.
Source: Tech Crunch