To some, it looks like Zuckerberg has abandoned Facebook’s roots, between the re-brand and the $10 billion Meta is spending on AR, VR, and related hardware.
Over the past week though, we saw two innovative new social products from Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team. Facebook isn’t new to side projects, but it launched its NPE Team in 2019 to officially dedicate makers to experiments.
The first, Recess, helps remote teams connect. Aman Jain said that the four-person team behind Recess had never met IRL, and they couldn’t recreate the camaraderie you get from lunch chit chat or coffee runs no matter which products they tried.
Recess says it’s different in a couple of ways. The tool delivers conversation prompts through Slack, but the algorithm mixes meaningful questions with lighter-weight ones (whereas “many other apps focus on more frivolous prompts,” Jain wrote). Another difference is the way Recess uses your answers. The Recess bear “automagically surfaces commonalities” and “organizes the team’s responses into a memory vault” for newcomers to assimilate quickly.
Adorable animals indeed prompt conversation over here on the Product Hunt team. But can an alpaca get you to check off your to-do list?
Move, the second recent app launch from a Facebook NPE team, helps groups organize and get things done through social tasking and alpaca avatars. Groups, in this case, means friends, students, nonprofits, and so on (i.e. not enterprises). Matt Gabor explained that his team wanted to help empower grassroots organizers & non-profits but found during testing that any small group can benefit from the app.
How it works is the fun part. Users earn points for completing their tasks, which they can use to “drip out” their alpaca avatars. The implications of that can be anything from social pressure (your alpaca's naked!) to social competition (could your alpaca BE wearing any more clothes?)
Move is currently free (and only in the US, sorry) as the NPE Team hopes to gain more learnings from this release. We can see these alpaca avatars following you into the metaverse one day (after all, we’ve seen llama NFTs before) but how Meta decides to use any learnings remains to be seen.
We’ll end this newsletter with a couple shoutouts to non big tech makers, too. For a gamified to-do lists for yourself mixed with cute birds, Habit Bird just launched. Or if you long left social apps behind, check out Circles.
Uber is launching Uber Explore, a new product in the Uber app that will allow you to browse and book experiences including dinner reservations, live events, and other fun activities.
The Explore tab lets you discover places based on categories such as food & drink, art & culture, nightlife, and music & shows; you can get there in one-click rides.
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