Late last month, Facebook’s NPE team announced an invite-only beta for Forecast, an app that lets users make crowdsourced predictions.
A week or so before Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team (NPE) announced the shutdown of Hobbi and Lasso, it announced yet another experimental app. Forecast – an invite-only beta on iOS at the moment – is a community for crowdsourced predictions and collective insights, where members can “pose questions about the future, make predictions, and discuss and distill their knowledge into a single forecast.”
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“People are increasingly searching for information to help them understand what the world might look like tomorrow, next month, and beyond,” explained Forecast’s Product Lead, Rebecca Kossnick. “We believe that a community built around predictions is not only a good way to surface crowdsourced wisdom, but may also help to encourage healthier online conversations across a broad range of topics.”
For the time being, making predictions and participating in conversations will be available in the iOS app only, and only to invited community members based in the US and Canada. Kossnick explains, however, that all predictions and discussions will be public, and available to all, on the Forecast website. Furthermore, they can also be shared by anyone across platforms.
Forecast lets users ask questions and use their points within the app to make future predictions. All questions are submitted and then moderated according to Forecast’s moderation guidelines to adhere to Facebook’s Community Standards.
Forecasters are able to discuss their predictions and even visit other profiles to view predictions and opinions from others, or to follow each other. Finally, forecasters are able to see “their own prediction track record over time and climb the leaderboard for individual topics.”
Forecast is still in its very early stages, so new users will be invited incrementally. You can request access to the Forecast Beta Testers Facebook group and download the app to get started.