10 Facebook Products that Failed big time!

By Sudhiir

| Updated: Monday, March 14, 2016, 9:56 [IST]

Facebook has been at the forefront of innovations. However, the company started off initiatives that failed big time. These initiatives started off by the company were either criticized sometimes, while at other times they did not work and the company took down these services.

10 Facebook Products that Failed big time!

Several of these products have either found themselves violating net neutrality or violating privacy laws or a host of other laws. Facebook Products often tries to end up monetize its services in a rather failed way that made it an object of criticism in Europe, US and other parts of the world. While not all of them were available throughout the world, they were available only in select parts.

While Facebook as a Site remains highly visited for its social value, some of its products were a failure as people never used these products.

We look at 10 products that Facebook abandoned:

1

Parse is a mobile development platform that Facebook purchased in 2013. However Facebook closed down Parse citing reasons that it would focus on more important projects. Parse had a healthy list of clients. However, Facebook shut it down.

2

Facebook started Facebook deals in 2011 and closed in just 4 months.

3

Facebook Gift allowed Facebook users to shop for physical gifts and send them to friends. Facebook started this in September 2012 and closed it down within a year of starting it.

4

Facebook Credits allowed users to shop using credits they had gained from playing games like Farmville. Facebook Credits was closed down after users complained that the credit system was very confusing.

5

Autofill with Facebook allowed users to store credit card details of users. It was launched in September 2013 but has hardly become popular.

6

Facebook started an email service called Facebook inbox,So users could have an email address with a domain name of @facebook.com. However, Facebook dropped the service as a majority of people had never used the service.

7

Facebook came up with the idea of FBML in order to replace HTML on its website. However, the idea was dropped very soon.

8

Facebook Places was similar to Foursquare. However, Facebook shut down the system in September 2011 owing to privacy issues and complains from users.

9

Facebook Beacon was part of Facebook Advertising. Facebook used user data and sent it to advertisers in order for them to target users much better. The Service was shut down in September 2009 as it was violating user privacy.

10

Facebook's highly controversial Sponsored stories was initially banned as it could be misused. However, the feature was later bought back with several guidelines.