Facebook notified those still using Notify, its news alerts application, that it would be shuttering the service as of Thursday. Divulged via a push notification, the move came just seven months after the social network gave the app its debut. At launch, it had 70 media outlets, including Bloomberg, CNN and the Washington Post, producing several alerts per day.

But Notify isn’t completely going away. Instead, the news alert system will be integrated into other Facebook products and services, according to the company. Those products include Messenger, the Verge reported. Some publishers have already been working with Facebook’s messaging app to experiment with chat bots, a system launched at the F8 developer conference in April. CNN was the launch partner.

“Since launching Notify, we’ve learned a lot about how to make notifications as timely and relevant as possible and we heard from people using the app that Notify helped them stay informed about things they cared about throughout the day,” Facebook said in a statement cited by the Verge. “With more than 900 million people using Messenger each month, we think there is a great opportunity for publishers to reach even more people interested in real-time updates from their favorite sources.”

Change in Facebook’s services for publishers comes as little surprise. Indeed, several partners speaking to International Business Times shortly after the launch said they saw Notify as an experiment. “We’ll get instant feedback on these push notifications on what’s working and what isn’t. That’s very exciting for us from an experimental perspective,” Mashable Social Projects Manager Ryan Lytle wrote in an email.

Discussion around Notify came shortly after Facebook released Instant Articles, its direct publishing system. Some publishers originally saw Notify as a competitor to Twitter, while others used it to share feature articles rather than breaking-news alerts.

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