Nokia Pulls The Plug On Friend View
Back in November we wrote a lengthy piece on the new Nokia Friend View. The service was supposed to focus around location based microblogging. Today Nokia announced they have pulled the plug on the service (or actually did so already on the 2nd of September) on the project website and through an e-mail to its users.
The guess is that the service adoption figures weren't attractive enough and as such there's no point in putting effort into a service that nobody is using. The website shows community messages dating back to August 2009 so the small community was active, but apparently not large enough. Furthermore, we've grown away from the hype days of microblogging. The market has been divided basically by two major players globally, Facebook and Twitter, with smaller companies grabbing local markets.
Nokia has however learned something, they are enabling users to download their messages from the service to their computers as an XML-file. I also admire, despite never being a big fan of the service, that they've actually managed to close down the service. It takes guts to admit "not being successful" and move on.
You can read more about the archiving of the project on their blog. Below is the message that was sent to users of the service today.
Important Note to Friend Viewers: Nokia Friend View is an experimental research project from Nokia Research Center. The Friend View project was moved to the Beta Labs "Archived" section (http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/archived) on September 2, 2009. It will be discontinued (shut down) on September 30, 2009.More details about this are available here: http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-friend-view
Thank you very much for helping us by participating in the Friend View project, and for all your feedback which will help Nokia to improve its services!
Many thanks,
The Friend View team
3 Comments
Add your comment
well, FV was months before Latitude, but as VCs are saying: execution is everything.
PS. FV had a very poor UI/UX, at least on the viral/invitation part. Latitude just blew them out of the water...
Maybe it was because of the Facebook/Nokia/Plazes location thing that was supposedly released a bit ago?
http://seekingalpha.com/article/159445-facebook-takes-another-step-into-the-location-game-with-nokia
FriendView was a great research project, ahead of the mainstream times and thats exactly what research projects are meant to be.
At the end we took all the experiences and learnings and turned them into a much broader experience: Lifecasting.
Together with Facebook it allows us to "share" location in the way that in not only answers the question "where are you" - but more importantly, provides the conversational tools for people to communicate about "what to do here".
Do recommend you try it out. Anssi made a nice comment in his Nokia World keynote: "Sharing is the new Sending" and Lifecasting deeply integrated with Facebook for the start will be the channel.
Log in or Sign up to leave comments