Facebook tests “sidebar status” feature in mobile apps, similar to AIM's away message
Casey Newton / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
In April 2015 Facebook was running a string of small-surface mobile experiments — around the same time it tested in-app keyword search that let users attach articles to status updates and, by October, redesigned mobile profiles with temporary and looping video pictures (profile redesign with temporary photos). The sidebar status fit that pattern: a lightweight, AIM-style presence signal bolted onto the mobile app rather than a new feed.
The experiment's afterlife is what makes it notable. Facebook killed sidebar status off within months, yet the idea resurfaced two years later as 101-character expiring status messages, and by 2019 had evolved into automatic status, location and battery sharing with Close Friends on Instagram's Threads — the away message concept migrating from novelty to always-on ambient sharing.
First-order effects
- Mobile app users in the test group gain a low-friction way to broadcast availability to friends without composing a full post, directly borrowing AIM's away-message mechanic.
Second-order effects
- When Facebook kills the feature months later, the test still does its job as market research — feeding the design of later status products like the 2017 expiring messages and Threads' Close Friends sharing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's app portfolio functions as a permanent test lab where short-lived experiments are recycled into successors, so individual feature deaths matter less than which concepts keep returning.
The trend: Facebook keeps circling back to lightweight, ephemeral presence signals — from AIM-style away messages to expiring status text to automatic Close Friends sharing on Threads — treating each test as a waypoint rather than a launch.