Facebook rolls out photo slide show feature, but says goodbye to Lexicon

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Anyone who has spent time clicking through large photo albums on Facebook knows how tiring the experience can be. But with the help of a recently launched Facebook prototype called Slideshow, users can cut down on click fatigue.

After downloading Slideshow, Facebook users will see a “play” button between the “previous” and “next” links in a photo album. By clicking the play option, users can sit back and watch as each photo in the album is displayed in timed intervals. The app doesn’t offer customization, so users won’t be able to adjust how long an image is displayed. That said, users can pause the slide show on an image by clicking the “stop” option that replaces the play button during viewing.

Since it’s a prototype, Slideshow is only available by downloading it from Facebook’s prototype page. It can be deactivated at any time if a user doesn’t like it.

But as the social network brings one new service to the site, it has quietly removed another. Facebook’s Lexicon analytics app has been taken down.

“Thank you for your interest in Lexicon,” a message on Facebook’s Lexicon page reads. “We are removing the Lexicon product from Facebook for the time being.”

Whether Facebook will bring Lexicon back is unknown. The company would only say that it “may bring components of Lexicon back in the future.”

Lexicon was a largely ignored Facebook feature. Users input keywords into Lexicon’s search box, prompting the tool to display a graph showing when and how frequently those keywords were mentioned in status updates.

Lexicon was similar to Google Trends, a tool from the search giant that allows users to input keywords and see when, where and how often those keywords have been included in Google Search queries.

-- Don Reisinger