After launching its Forecast app in June, Facebook NPE is now making the app available to all users in the United States and Canada.
Earlier this year, Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team launched Forecast, an iOS app for crowdsourced predictions and collective insights, allowing members to “pose questions about the future, make predictions, and discuss and distill their knowledge into a single forecast.”
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Following the success of the beta, NPE is now opening Forecast to everyone in the US and Canada, “making the most engaged-with questions — about news and current events — easier to find, forecast, and share.”
Forecast’s “prediction market” lets people use virtual points to trade on future event outcomes, and since it was launched its community has made over 37,000 forecasts on hundreds of questions that others have. However, apart from the predictions, Forecast is also a great discussion space.
“In the process of reasoning about their predictions, people share insights about what’s going on today and debate what it means for tomorrow,” explains Forecast’s Product Lead, Rebecca Kossnick. “Like any set of predictions, Forecast cannot offer definitive answers about the future.”
Furthermore, the community’s interaction has proved that explaining how one might arrive at a forecast encourages “measured, respectful conversation.”
NPE’s team has also updated the Forecast website to make it easier for users to navigate most-discussed forecasts, letting them browse popular topics, and get a good view of user-generated predictions.
Forecast isn’t only about making and viewing crowdsourced predictions; Members can now also make, share, and track their own forecasts across platforms.