I’m a little biased when it comes to Pinterest because I actually really like the app. While it’s not much of a social media platform, it’s a great source for ideas and images; it’s the first place I check when looking for art of specific characters or concepts when I’m making my own creations in a written story of a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Pinterest just seems like the kind of app that’s been around for ages now, nothing really comes close to competing with it. Yet that didn’t stop Facebook from trying with its hand at developing its own app named Hobbi which proved so unsuccessful that it’s been unceremoniously executed only a few months after launching.
Hobbi dropped as an iOS app back in February of this year and was labelled as a social platform for enthusiasts to gather inspiration, catalogue concepts and share images of things they really enjoy yet despite the positivity at the core of an app such as this, people weren’t all that stoked on the concept. According to Mashable, Hobbi was met with criticism due to it’s “unoriginal and derivative” concept. So it’s probably no surprise that as of 10 July Hobbi will cease to exist.
Look, I’m sure it’s not a great tragedy because if you were somehow using Hobbi over the vastly superior Pinterest it’s very simple to just…move over thanks to the ability to export data. Hobbi was always viewed as a bit of an experiment by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation Team which has the goal of trying “different ideas by creating small, focused apps in order to see whether people find certain features useful or engaging.” Which I guess sucks if you were a developer on Hobbi that really believed in the product but I guess that’s just business, right?