Facebook is at it again. In a bid to try and ride the Snapchat wave, they’ve come up with a similar app of their own to try and capture that illusive teenage audience’s attention. So in a pretty smart move, they got a teenager to develop it.
I dread to think what on earth I was doing at the age of 19, but product manager (yes, manager) Michael Sayman seems to be doing pretty damn well. He’s probably the youngest product manager at team Facebook, and his latest creation will probably have him sitting pretty for a while.
The new app is called Lifestage and the idea is to connect people in high school with their fellow students (anyone else having Social Network/ Jesse Eisenberg flashbacks?) The difference is that its pretty video heavy. And instead of having a profile photo, users take various selfies to show off their different ‘faces’.
Mashable reported that although Michael and his friends used all of the go to social media apps (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter) he felt none of them give much away about persons personality.
With Lifestage, your profile picture is a series of selfies and videos that you take to demonstrate how super cool you are, who you’re dating and how ace your taste in music is. The idea is to showcase your personality so people get a feel for who you are.
I’m not gonna lie, it does sound like quite a lot of effort. I’m pretty sure that my Facebook profile picture has been the same for about 3 years and I really hate having to write bio lines. But maybe it’s because I have left my teens and this is what the kids are in to now.
What I think is a particularly big deal is that there’s no way to actually converse with people. No, no. There isn’t a messaging feature or anything. You just scroll through their various selfie faces and watch their videos and learn about their lives. So basically it’s Facebook stalking made super easy. But you can post the username for your preferred messaging app so people can find you there.
‘This mechanic is cool, I liked this concept of being able to see people's profiles in my school communities and see who they were all about,’ Michael told Mashable. ‘What if we were to grab what Facebook from 2004 was and bring it to 2016 and bring it into what we've been trying to understand with video and content creation.’
Fair play to the guy. I’ll was sceptical about Snapchat at first and now it’s part of my daily (ahem, hourly) activity, so who knows. Maybe it’ll revolutionise the high school in the same way Facebook did university.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.