On Friday, June 3, Facebook sent an alert to users announcing to them that "Notify" news "app will no longer be supported."
MacRumors reports that the social media giant is shutting down its notification-based news app after it just launched Notifty in November. The application is allowing users to select news notifications from over 70 publishers.
According to TechCrunch, Notify sends Facebook's users short summaries that could be clicked through in order to view full news articles. Among Notify's features was the ability to set up sub-topics alerts.
For instance, instead of subscribing to all NBA basketball news coming from CBS Sports, users could just choose to get notifications about their favorite team. Instead of receiving all the Bloomberg financial news, users could just set the app to send them notifications about certain companies.
However, the application did not enjoy much popularity and within days most people had forgotten about it. Facebook's announcement states that starting on Wednesday, Notify functionality will start to be integrated into Messenger and other products. The application will be removed from the app store.
Notify only had 63,000 downloads, according to an estimate made by the mobile intelligence startup SensorTower. Those publishers that were on Notify are now desperately pushing their followers to Like their Facebook Pages in order to stay connected.
Tech analysts hope that Facebook will port over the same level of control to other products. They assist to increase the number of chatbots operating online. Facebook announced that over 10,000 developers are already creating chatbots for its Messenger.
These AI apps could dehumanize communication by overrunning the chat app and sending unwanted spam. In this context, a more organized discovery tool could come in handy.
Notify's granular alerts could give users only relevant information and keep chatbot noise down. Chatbots could also benefit from Notify's categorized publisher discovery tool. Rather than searching a massive list, users could just see outlets related to gaming, fashion, business and other categories.
