Facebook on Monday announced a new Craigslist competitor called Marketplace inside its main app.
Facebook is giving its new Craigslist competitor prime real estate inside its app
But whatever happened to its live video tab?
Kurt Wagner / Recode
Facebook launches new products all the time, but this one is pretty important to the company. How do we know? Because Facebook is showing us.
Facebook
The company is giving Marketplace its own tab in the very middle of Facebook’s home screen toolbar on its iPhone app. That means it will replace the Messenger tab, which has been in that spot ever since Facebook spun Messenger out as its own app and made a big push to get everyone to download it. (It has over a billion users now as a result.)
That’s prime real estate for Marketplace, and a clear indication of how important the new effort is for Facebook.
But remember: Facebook once promised that spot inside the app to another feature it wanted to push: Facebook live. In fact, Facebook announced in April that it was replacing the Messenger tab with a live video tab. As far as I can tell, that never happened. (A quick poll of friends and colleagues over the weekend resulted in zero people with a live video tab.)
So what happened? Just a slow rollout, Facebook says.
“We’ve been rolling out the video tab slowly so that we can test and learn from people, and to gather feedback to ensure that we’re creating the best experience for people who visit the tab,” a company spokesperson said. “We’re iterating on placement for the tab, though it will ultimately be on the bottom bar of News Feed on mobile.”
So it’s still coming, apparently. Though announcing a redesign specifically for live video then failing to push said redesign out even six months later doesn’t provide a lot of confidence in Facebook’s live video bet. At the very least, it doesn’t seem to be moving as quickly as the company once expected.
The new Marketplace feature is rolling out Monday on iOS and Android as part of an app update. It’ll be available first in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
