Once attempting to become an alternative to the extremely popular Snapchat mobile app, Facebook’s Poke application has been removed from the iOS App Store and the removal has been confirmed by Facebook representatives. Likely due to a lack of users, Poke was widely panned at the December 2012 launch and basically failed to pull users away from Snapchat. While Facebook engineers touted that the company only spent twelve days developing the application, a lack of continuous updates partly contributed to the failure of the application.

In addition to the removal of Poke, Facebook has pulled the Camera application from the App Store, despite leaving the landing page for the app active. However, the need for this application has dwindled since identical features are currently found within the core Facebook mobile application. Features that were added to the Facebook mobile app included sharing multiple photos at once, adding filters to alter the appearance of the photos and a more complex tagging system to tag all your friends and family in uploaded pictures.

Despite the removal of these application, Facebook is going to continue developing alternative mobile applications within the Creative Labs team. Paper was the first mobile application created by the team and it has gained a significant amount of praise from the tech community as well as average users. The latest version of Paper, released in late April 2014, includes new features such as support for birthdays and events as well as photo comment support, group updates and new article covers. The overall speed and performance of the application has also been improved marginally.

In a related story, the Web version of Facebook was down earlier today for some users due to a technical issue. A Facebook representative released a statement about the issue which read “Earlier this afternoon we experienced an issue with our serving infrastructure that prevented some people from accessing Facebook for a short time. We’ve resolved the underlying problem and service is recovering. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

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