We reported this week that Facebook has made the decision to close its Pinterest clone Hobbi and now, they’re at it again shuttering its TikTok competitor Lasso with the last day you can access the app being July 10th. To mark the closure, Lasso users were notified of the closure via a push notification as well as an accompanying message stating how to download your uploaded videos.
Lasso was launched back in November 2018 as a competitor to TikTok, who has seen unprecedented growth in comparison, and described itself as an app that makes it “easy for anyone to create and share short videos with fun effects.” The App Store description also depicts strong Facebook integration by adding your videos straight on the ‘Stories’ section of the main site. While Facebook may have seen this as a handy feature, it was probably a turn off for most, who see the social media giant as being a data-hungry overlord.
While many don’t particularly like Facebook’s approach to business, it probably wasn’t the main reason for failure, that would be the rise of TikTok. TikTok has been consistently in the top apps in the app store while Lasso failed to hit these heights even once.
Facebook announced the impending death of its Pinterest competitor Hobbi this week, but it now appears the unloved app won’t die alone. The not-media company has revealed its TikTok competitor Lasso will also shut down on July 10, joining its cousin’s journey to the big app store in the sky.
While it might not come as too much of a shock to you with Hobbi also being removed from existence, Lasso was actually published under the Facebook main brand rather than the New Product Experimentation Team which is a little odd but Facebook must’ve presumed that it would see success with TikTok being such a giant.
All in all, it’s been a very busy week for Facebook with closures as well as announcing those interesting VR glasses, a mixed bag really!
