Facebook’s New App Is All About Getting Teens To Share Videos Of Themselves

Facebook is introducing a stand-alone, camera-first app that it hopes will spur teens to share short video about themselves. Sound familiar?

The app, called Lifestage, is not a Snapchat clone; it does not support messaging, a key Snapchat feature, and Facebook says it's not planning to change that any time soon. But after Facebook copied Snapchat twice in the past month — with Instagram Stories and its new video composer experiment — the similarities between the two are bound to raise some eyebrows.

Both apps are camera-first (meaning the start screen is a camera), both feature fun overlay filters, both encourage video sharing, and both are designed to appeal to teens.

Lifestage is essentially a reimagined version of the early Facebook profile with short videos replacing photos and written descriptions. Instead of a Facebook profile picture, Lifestage features profile videos showcasing your happy face, angry face, laughing face, and sad face. Instead of the traditional set of textual Facebook likes, Lifestage will feature videos of things you like.

Michael Sayman, the 19-year-old Facebook product manager behind Lifestage, told BuzzFeed News that he wanted to create what the old Facebook experience would look like if it were to be built from scratch today. The app opens up with a camera screen, a key Snapchat similarity that Facebook admits is a more natural starting point for people looking to share video, which the company believes will soon become its primary content type.

Though Facebook is now a $350 billion company with 1.7 billion monthly active users, that evolution has dulled some elements that drove its early success. Original sharing, for instance, is declining on its platform. These days, the goofy candids and personal posts that defined Facebook&039;s first iteration are increasingly crowded out by posts from brands, celebrities, and professional media outlets. In June, Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm to emphasize stories from friends and family, a clear move to restore balance and a throwback to its early days. Lifestage is geared to bring back some of that early magic too.

Facebook is pitching Lifestage at high schoolers: When 20 or more students from the same school register for the app, they&039;ll be able to start browsing through their classmates&039; profiles. The app, which debuts today, will initially be available only in the United States and on Apple&039;s iOS platform.

While Facebook has released a number of stand-alone apps, only one has truly succeeded at market — Facebook Messenger, which debuted as a forced download for existing Facebook users. Meanwhile, the poor performance of experimental apps like Slingshot, Riff, Rooms, and a disappointing Snapchat clone called Poke led Facebook to shut down the Creative Labs division responsible for making them last year.

So launching an app like Lifestage after a string of stand-alone app failures seems a daunting prospect indeed. But creator Sayman is confident the app&039;s camera-first design will resonate with its intended audience. And if it doesn&039;t make a huge splash, there&039;s always version 2. “More than anything, I&039;m really curious to see what will happen and how will people react to this kind of experience,” he said. “It&039;s really an exploration of that [camera-first] world.”

Quelle: <a href="Facebook’s New App Is All About Getting Teens To Share Videos Of Themselves“>BuzzFeed

Instagram's Stories Is An Example Of Tech's Disgusting Anti-Lefty Bias

TBH, I think Instagram&#039;s new Snapchat-clone feature, “Stories”, is pretty good. There was a little bit of skepticism at first, but now that it&039;s been out for two weeks, people seem pretty into it. It&039;s fun to see people use Instagram in a more loose way without the pressure of feeling like you have to pick the perfect image for your feed. And Instagram has a big advantage for me over Snapchat stories: I follow way more people on Instagram already, so its stories are more fun since it&039;s a weird mix of people: celebrities, friends, randos, weird funny accounts.

But there is one thing that is FAR FAR FAR inferior to Snapchat:

It sucks for lefties.

I&039;ll explain: One of the cool features on Instagram stories is that you can easily go “back” to re-watch the previous person&039;s story as you&039;re tapping through. Snapchat doesn&039;t let you re-watch as easily – you have to go back to the homescreen and pick out the person you want to see again.

This maneuver is accomplished by tapping on the left-hand side of the screen. Left side tap means back, right side tap means forward.

A lefty tends to tap on the left side, which is “BACK”:

And herein lies the problem. If you&039;re a lefty, you&039;re more likely to be holding the phone in your left hand, tapping with your left thumb.

Since the left thumb is naturally closer to the left edge, you&039;re used to doing most general scrolling or tapping on the left edge. This means that you&039;re constantly accidentally hitting “back” and having to re-watch stories you don&039;t want to see again. If you want to go forward, you have to stretch your thumb across the screen, obscuring the visuals, or use another hand.

On Snapchat, you can only skip forward, but you can tap anywhere you please on the screen to skip ahead — no problem for lefties.

Silver pencil hand: the lefty&039;s curse in life.

Plenty of everyday objects have been inconvenient for the 1 out of 9 of the population who are lefties: can openers, spiral notebooks, school desks, scissors. We&039;ve learned to adapt (maybe that&039;s why we&039;re so much smarter).

Technological devices have added a new layer of inconvenience. Basic things like computer mice are designed for righties. Certain devices have their own built-in bias: Kindle Paperwhite wants you to “turn” the page by tapping on the right side of the screen (left is “back”). Only older models are ambidextrous page turners. I mean, it&039;s FINE, you can still turn a page, but it&039;s far less comfortable and convenient for someone who wants to mostly hold the device in their left hand.

And the Kindle app for iPad also has the same page-turning bias:

Look, it&039;s not like lefties can&039;t use Instagram. This isn&039;t life threatening or dangerous or anything like that. Accidentally hitting “back” a few times while thumbing through your friends&039; pics isn&039;t the worst thing in the world.

But left-handed people account for 1 out of 9 of us&#033; For a service like Instagram with an estimated 500 million users, that means something like 55 million lefties are now accidentally bonking the “back” button on Stories.

Product designers and user interface designers should be considering left-handed users when they&039;re designing these new features.

Listen up, Instagram: we demand lefty rights&033;

Quelle: <a href="Instagram&039;s Stories Is An Example Of Tech&039;s Disgusting Anti-Lefty Bias“>BuzzFeed

Chatbots Have Yet To Live Up To Hype, Says Kik CEO

The bot revolution isn’t exactly taking off as planned, and that could mean trouble for the social businesses betting on it.

In a Medium post published earlier this week, Ted Livingston, CEO of messaging app Kik, looked back on the four months since his company and Facebook Messenger introduced chatbot platforms, and conceded they were off to a disappointing start. “So far, there has been no killer bot,” he wrote. “This is not yet the world that the early hype promised.”

For anyone who’s suffered through a stilted chatbot interaction, Livingston’s sigh of disappointment will hardly come as a surprise. What is surprising is that it&#039;s being made publicly — by the leader of a prominent company that&039;s placed a big bet on chatbots. Livingston does note that he&039;s still bullish on bots. But that seems a caveat to a longer expression of uncertainty. It&039;s clear that if the chatbot experiment continues along its current low-altitude trajectory, it could cause some headaches — especially for Facebook, it&039;s biggest proponent.

Original sharing is declining on Facebook, per reports, and the company is seeing more action in its messaging apps, making them, and bots by extension, more critical to its ambitions. “A lot of people want to share messages privately, one-on-one or with very small groups,” Mark Zuckerberg said in an April earnings call. Given this, Facebook will likely need to get more revenue out of Messenger and WhatsApp in order to keep growing at the same pace — especially since its main platform’s ad load is nearing capacity.

That’s where bots are supposed to come in. On Facebook proper, the company connects advertisers with their customers via ads that take them to the advertisers’ websites, or show them a video on Facebook itself. On Messenger, the company plans to connect advertisers with their customers via Sponsored Messages that take them to the advertisers’ bots. If people don’t want to use bots, though, advertisers won’t want to shell out cash to promote them.

“I think there’s opportunity,” said Jess Bahr, director of paid promotion and strategy at SocialFlow, a social media management software company. But she said she sees more value in an engaged user. “It’s almost like a more qualified audience.”

Still only four months in, it’s too early to write bots off. And now the platforms are starting to learn and adjust. As Livingston pointed out, maybe the “chat” part of the chatbot needs to be rethought. “Part of the misfire with the conversational aspect of bots has to do with the fact that natural language processing and artificial intelligence are not yet accomplished at managing human-like conversations,” he said. Tapping through interactions, as users of China-based WeChat’s users do, could be one alternative.

Asked if they would continue to invest in the bots, early Facebook Messenger partners 1-800-FLOWERS.com and Poncho (a weather bot) said they would. And Kik investor Fred Wilson wrote in a blog post Wednesday that he still believes in bots too. “The hype phase is over and we are now into the figuring it out phase,” he said. “That’s usually when interesting stuff starts to happen.”

For Facebook and its ilk, it’s important that he’s right.

Quelle: <a href="Chatbots Have Yet To Live Up To Hype, Says Kik CEO“>BuzzFeed