Facebook makes Forecast, an app for crowdsourced predictions and collective insights, available to all users
or is taunting us Jefferson Mangubat / Neowin : Facebook rolls out its crowdsourced predictions service to everyone in the U.S. and Canada Tweets: Alex Heath / @alexeheath : This app from Facebook is for making crowdsourced predictions, with the top one right now asking who will win the presidential election. https://forecastapp.net/ Has been in closed beta but FB is now making to available to everyone in the U.S. and Canada https://npe.fb.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Forecast began in June as an invite-only experiment from Facebook's NPE Team, which incubates standalone apps around community formats — in this case, wagering in-app points on world events. Opening it to every user in the U.S. and Canada converts that test into a mainstream product just weeks before the presidential election, whose outcome is currently the app's top market.
The move slots into a broader stretch of information-product launches from Facebook: Facebook News arrived in June as a curated journalism section, and Forecast extends the same playbook toward aggregating collective judgment rather than publisher content.
First-order effects
- U.S. and Canadian users gain open access to point-based prediction markets, with the presidential election as the highest-profile question — making Facebook a mass-scale aggregator of election forecasts ahead of November 3.
- The NPE Team gets its first Forecast dataset at full population scale, replacing the closed-beta cohort that shaped the product since June.
Second-order effects
- Forecast now runs parallel to Facebook's plan to surface the projected election winner in notifications across Facebook and Instagram, concentrating both crowd forecasts and official projections inside one company's surfaces during a contested news cycle.
- The points model sidesteps real-money gaming rules while delivering the engagement mechanics of betting markets, pressuring standalone prediction platforms on distribution they cannot match.
Third-order effects
- If the NPE pipeline keeps graduating apps into the core product — as it later did with Fantasy Games in the U.S. and Canada — prediction-style engagement becomes a standing Facebook feature category rather than an experiment, with the company arbitrating what counts as collective insight on politically charged questions.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing crowdsourced prediction and judgment aggregation into their own apps, using points instead of money to capture forecasting engagement at feed scale.