Facebook bought an application for polls, which has existed for only two months. What is it?

Facebook announced on October 16 on the purchase of TBH mobile application. This application exists a little more than two months, but has already attracted several million users - mostly American schoolchildren. "Medusa" tells what TBH is.

The TBH application allows users to answer questions about their friends. For example, such: “Who is the best guest at a party?”, “Whose perseverance is admirable?”, “Who can become a poet?”

Under each question, the user sees a list of four names taken from his list of contacts. The one he chose receives a notification-something like "someone admired your perseverance." The application is anonymous, so who exactly thought so about you, cannot be found out.

In September, TBH wrote TECHCRUNCH: the publication noted that, unlike other anonymous applications, this is not used for mockery of people. All due to the fact that in TBH you can’t enter their text - users only answer the questions he proposed. So that they do not spend too much time in TBH, there is a restriction in it - within an hour you can answer no more than 12 questions.

The applicationappeared in the App Store in early August, since then users have answered a billion questions. TBH is available only in three dozen US states (and is not available in Russia), but it has already been downloaded five million times. The daily audience of the application is 2.5 million people.

The amount for which Facebook bought TBH is not disclosed. According to TechCrunch, this is less than $ 100 million. Four founders of the application will go to work on Facebook, but will continue to develop TBH using the company's infrastructure.

The publication lists the advantages that the rapidly growing application from the transaction will receive: its creators will not have to think about raising funds; so that the servers do not fall from the load, Facebook engineers will now monitor; The application will receive access to protection from spam and moderation of content; Finally, TBH with Facebook will be able to enter the international market.

The fact that Facebook decided to buy TBH, and not to clone the application, is surprisingly, given the previous attempts by Mark Zuckerberg, to “hook” the market of young Internet users.

Explaining the sale of TBH, its founders said that they "share [with Facebook] the same values ​​associated with the unification of people through positive emotions." The Verge journalist Casey Newton wrote a more realistic version of their statement: “When we met with Facebook, we realized that they could completely recreate our application in one weekend.”

The TBH website is not available from Russia and Latvia - when trying to come to it, a mistake appears on it, which says: the server is "tuned to block access from your country."

Sultan Suleimanov