Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team, which recently announced a shift in focus for its approach, has released yet another new app experiment, with its ‘Move’ app designed to help organize group tasks, with in-app rewards for participants.

As described by NPE (on the App Store):

“Get more done with friends. Manage your personal and group to-do lists with Move Tasks App. Check off tasks as you finish them and get a first-hand look into what your group is doing (and not doing)! Getting stuff done earns you points to drip out your Alpaca Avatar and show who’s REALLY productive.”

It’s kind of like the type of incentive you’d give your kids for doing tasks around the house, except instead of pocket money to buy the latest toys, you get digital toys instead, in the form of items and features for your avatar character, which in this case is an alpaca.

Why an alpaca? I mean, why not – the internet seems to be obsessed with drawings of monkeys at the moment, alpacas probably deserve some love too.

It’s essentially a small-scale project management app, where you can assign tasks within a group for more light-hearted, fun rewards. So project management, but without the threat of being fired for not pulling your weight, with the only impact for such being a less-evolved alpaca in the app.

Which could be good, I guess, though I don’t see it being a massive hit.

I’m also not exactly sure if or how this fits with NPE’s new approach either.

Back in December, Meta announced that the NPE team would be shifting its focus to building with and for communities that have “historically been overlooked, underestimated, and undervalued by our industry”. The idea is that while the latest broad-scale trends are able to drive greater app adoption, there are many areas where new use cases and functionalities are evolving, which may not have the same level of broad appeal, but could lead to significant new shifts.

Meta’s hoping that this approach will help it link into new niches in new markets – but whether Move fits that bill, I’m not clear.

Then again, the app may have been in development since before the shift in focus, or it may be part of NPEs new focus on investment in newer start-ups that are developing interesting and innovative applications.

Either way, the release will be NPE’s 14th app experiment, with all but two of those apps now either shut down or about to be shuttered in the coming weeks.

Which probably doesn’t bode well for the future of Move either – but maybe there’s a unique use case I’m not seeing, or a specific, regional value for this type of organizational tool and process.

Tell you what, if Meta could make those alpacas into unique, downloadable NFTs as well, I’d bet that a whole lot of people would be incredibly keen to complete their assigned tasks in the app, and if that could be done at scale, that could be interesting.

We’ll have to wait and see, but there does seem to be some potential to the app.

Thanks to Michael Slender for the tip about the new app.