Hot on the heels of launching a standalone Messenger app, Facebook is now said to be working on a private sharing app that will operate independently from the main Facebook app. Reports are surfacing of ‘Moments’, an app that will allow users to share with preset groups of people, but without having to use the drop-down privacy options from the normal status update mechanism.
According to those who have seen ‘Facebook Moments‘, there is a grid of tiles representing sets of close friends or family, which users can tap on to quickly share an update with only that group. It’s hoped that this will be a much easier mechanism for sharing with selected groups than the existing method, which involves having to fiddle around with the privacy settings every time you want to post an update to a select audience.
However, you might well be sitting there scratching your head, thinking to yourself “I’ll still have to create the sharing lists in the first place. won’t I?”, or indeed, “Isn’t this exactly the same as Circles on Google+?” Well, yes, is the short answer to both.
‘Friend Lists’ have existed for quite some time, but there seems to have been a relatively widespread reticence to making earnest use of the feature. There may be certain items of content that you could share with 10 friends, and other piece might only be appropriate for eight of them, but another item might be shared with a different eight people of the original 10.
Creating and naming multiple lists with almost infinite cross-over possibilities would be an arduous task for anyone, but with ‘Moments’, it should be as simple as carving out the subsets of users that you want to share with each time, so the groups that you can pick from grow organically. That’s the view of Josh Constine at TechCrunch, who has written an article covering what is currently known of ‘Moments’, and looks back at Facebook’s struggle with getting people to adopt Friend Lists.
What are your thoughts on Facebook potentially releasing another standalone app? The user backlash surrounding the forced use of Facebook Messenger earlier in the year was palpable, and some confusion over mobile device app permissions certainly ruffled feathers with regards to Facebook user privacy. But with ‘Moments’ moving towards affording users greater privacy – or perhaps greater ease of privacy – when it comes to what they share with whom, will Facebook win back users’ trust? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.