Menlo Park, US, October 16 — Facebook has a new member in its social network family. After Instagram and WhatsApp, they are now taking over the uprising, yet still quite new, app called tbh. It has been developed by Midnight Labs and it’s available on iOS with plans to have an Android version out soon.
The rumor says cost was huge considering the fact they are newcomers. Both companies haven’t announced the exact cost of the acquisition, but it is less than $100m. Facebook was primarily interested in their main feature – sending compliments.
Apparently, tbh allows teens to send compliments completely anonymous to whoever they want, within a social scope, such as their school. Even though they only released this app in summer this year, it has been downloaded over 5 million times already. It quickly became popular amongst teens and more areas were supported shortly after release.
From the start, tbh aimed and focused on open communication and supporting users with their emotional needs. “More importantly, we’ve been inspired by the countless stories where tbh helped people recover from depression and form better relationships with friends”, they wrote in public announcement posted on their website.
How does the tbh app actually work?
The idea is to create pleasant communication with positive questions like “who makes you feel good”, or “who does make you laugh”, that comes from the selection of Facebook friends. User then get the answers but without knowing from whom. According to tbh’s statistic, more than one billion messages had been sent since it launched.
Midnight Labs’ co-founder, Nikita Bier told TechCrunch that they tend to improve the mental health of millions of teens. Like with Instagram though, Facebook’s acquisition won’t change how tbh works or even change how they are operating. This is at least the plan as of now.
tbh founders also wrote in their statement, “When we met with Facebook, we realized that we shared many of the same core values about connecting people through positive interactions. Most of all, we were compelled by the ways they could help us realize tbh’s vision and bring it to more people”.
It was an interesting development of the situation. Facebook decided to acquire the app instead of just cloning it. As a matter of fact, tbh really comes with an effective UI and already gained popularity and there no surprise why they decided to acqui-hire the team instead of fighting them.
YouTube: Facebook Acquires Messaging App tbh (Fortune)
Photo credit: Midnight Labs / Grey World
Source: Midnight Labs news post / Josh Constine (TechCrunch)
