Facebooks first experimental apps from its NPE Team division focus on students, chat & music
This July, Facebook announced a new division called NPE Team which would build experimental consumer-facing apps, allowing the company to try out new ideas and features to see how people would react.
As in Turntable.fm, the idea with Aux is that of a virtual DJing experience where people instead of algorithms are programming the music.
This concept of crowdsourced DJing also caught on in years past with radio stations that put their audiences in control of the playlist through their mobile app.
Later, streaming music apps like Spotify experimented with party playlists, and various startups launched their own guest-controlled playlists.
As the app describes it, Aux is a DJ for Your School a title thats a bit confusing, as it brings to mind music being played over the schools intercom system, as opposed to a social app for kids who attend school to use in the evenings.
38 among all Music apps on the Canadian App Store on October 22, which may point to some sort of short campaign to juice the downloads.
Essentially an anonymous chat app, the idea here is that Bump can help people connect by giving them icebreakers to respond to using text.
That levels the playing field a bit, compared with other social apps and certainly dating apps where the most attractive users with the best photos tend to receive the most attention.
Whats interesting is that only one of these NPE Team apps, Bump, discloses in its App Store description that the NPE Team is from Facebook.
Facebook hasnt said much about its plans for the NPE Team beyond the fact that they will focus on new ways of building community and may be shut down quickly if theyre not useful.
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