Facebook’s motto used to be ‘Move fast and break stuff’, but with the transition to the new mantra of ‘Move Fast With Stable Infra’ in 2014, they’ve shown a more responsible outlook alongside their now public fiscal side of things. To this end, Facebook has apparently shut down their Creative Labs division, the garage project responsible for apps such as Slingshot, Riff and Rooms, with the apps now removed from Google Play.
The apps were removed earlier this week, with a Facebook spokesperson telling CNet, that ‘Since their launches, we’ve incorporated elements of Slingshot, Riff and Rooms into the Facebook for iOS and Android apps’.
Creative Labs was launched in early 2014 when they launched their Paper app for iOS, the app never appeared on Android, though they did release a number of apps to Google Play for Android users. Slingshot, was Facebook’s main attempt at a Snapchat clone, though with a slightly different take; Rooms was a more modern take on Chat rooms and Riff was an interesting video chain app, which encouraged users to group like videos together in a chain.
Facebook’s Creative Labs also released the Hello Dialer, and Moments app to Google Play, though these apps have migrated to the main Facebook channel and are still available on Google Play.
Facebook also told C-Net that they would continue to experiment with new apps, so stay tuned, but as we’ve seen with Google, they have no issues with killing a project or app that shows no promise. Unfortunately Slingshot, Riff and Rooms are now no longer available through Google Play, so you’ll have to source them elsewhere if you want to check them out.
