According to the reports that we got from our sources, it appears Facebook will be releasing a new variety of experimental apps for its customers that was developed by the “NPE Team, from Facebook” label. The acronym NPE by the way stands for “new product experimentation”. The NPE team is working to develop new apps for iOS, Android, and the internet, the work they are doing is centered on providing consumer service and this is something that’s almost the same as what Microsoft Garage group is doing.
The social media company made the announcement of the new team in a blog post in which they also revealed the purpose of the team, in the post, Facebook notes that it “decided to use this separate brand name to help set the appropriate expectations with users that NPE Team apps will change very rapidly and will be shut down if we learn that they’re not useful to people”.
Looking back at Facebook’s record, we will find that it is not entirely surprising that the company is doing anything new. Long before now, the company has been releasing odd experimental apps, and as such they have a lot of products and features they have bought, launched and ultimately abandoned.
Some of these products include Moments (this is a photo-harvesting service that is designed to collect all your pictures and put them in a single location), there’s also Notify (a feature that allows a user to subscribe for notifications), Lifestage (an imitation of Snapchat), Poke (also a copy of Snapchat), Slingshot (another one of Snapchat’s clones), Tbh (an anonymous social media app), Moves (an app for tracking fitness), and Hello (a custom Android dialer).
There are a lot of people who would agree that the creation of the NPE as a separate group that will handle experimenting with new products and services at a rate faster than the company itself would and is far removed from the central part of the company is a clever idea. This way, the social media company will be able to try new things with having to worry about the consequences if they come to the conclusion that what they created bode well. Plus, the entire brand of the company will not be disrupted and there won’t be much expectations. The company was bold enough to declare that it “expect[s] many failures” and apps that are not useful will be shut down.
We have yet to get any information as to what kind of apps the NPE Team will be launching and when we should be expecting them. However, since the team has been announced, it should not take too long for their first products to be released.
Facebook is taking the internet world by storm daily. Though their privacy scandals remain a major hurdle to clear and starting such separately from the brand itself is indeed a clever move.