5 Facebook Features That No Longer Exist. Do You Miss Them?

Triberr has been helping Bloggers get more traffic for little over a year now. 2 Million visits for June ’12 alone. Brag, brag

And in that time, we’ve rolled out features, then killed those features. Created new ones, only to have them die a miserable death.

Through it all, our mission has always been the same. To help Bloggers be successful. And since both Dan and I are Bloggers, it only makes sense to share our solutions with other Bloggers.

However, that doesn’t mean we don’t feel miserable when we roll out something only to have to kill it few shorts months later for one reason or another. But then I looked at Facebook’s history of rolling out features only to kill them later, and somehow, it made me feel better.

So, here is a list of 5 features Facebook has rolled out, then killed. I hope it makes you feel better about your failures as it makes me feel better about mine.

R.I.P. FBML

FaceBook Markup Language (FBML) was similar to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and it allowed owners of Facebook business pages to customize the look of their Facebook page. Usually to create a custom landing page.

Facebook decided to support a more widespread standard (iFrame, but it did allow FBML pages to remain unaffected for the time being.

FBML is dead and gone. RIP FBML.

Facebook Gifts

Remember this?

Once upon a time you were able to gift virtual gifts to your friends. As stupid as this sounds, this was a cash cow for Facebook. It generated tens of millions of dollars for the company per year.

Killing FB Gifts probably had something to do with their partnership with Zynga, because virtual gifting is alive and well in Farmville.

Facebook Deals

Four months. That’s all it took for this one to die a miserable death.

Taking the cue from GroupOn and LivingSocial, Facebook decided to get into group-discount business. They dropped the group discount but kept the check-in piece.

Facebook Lite

No bandwidth? No problem!

That was the idea behind Facebook Lite. Built and discontinued in 8 months time. Yikes.

Facebook Notes

This one was a Facebook mainstay for many years. Introduced in 2006 and discontinued in 2011, Notes was a Facebook’s attempt to condition its residents to “blog”.

Eulogy

Clearly, Facebook has internalized “fail fast” philosophy. Roll out many features, let them grow or die organically, keep what works, throw away what doesn’t.

As a Founder of a Social Network for Bloggers, I pay close attention to Facebook’s trajectory. I keep an eye out for new Social Networks (I just joined Lady Gaga’s LittleMonsters Social Network), and I try to learn from their mistakes and steal from their successes.

The point of it all is to build a better Triberr for my fellow Bloggers.

• What is YOUR favorite failure? 
• Do you miss any of these Facebook features?