Facebook’s Lifestage is a video-centric social app for teens
Facebook isn’t done launching products designed to capture the Snapchat generation. Its latest attempt after Instagram Stories and live filters? A new standalone, video-centric social app for high school students called Lifestage. To be able to complete your profile, you’d have to take videos and selfies of your likes, dislikes and facial expressions. It will ask you take videos of your BFFs, to bust out dances moves on cam, take photos of your desserts, so on and so forth. When we say that it’s for high school students, we mean you won’t even be able to see other people’s profiles if you’re older than 22. That’s assuming you won’t creepily pretend to be younger than you are.
See, it only shows you profiles of other kids going to your school and other ones nearby, similar to how Facebook was in the beginning. Further, the app will only unlock profiles from your school if over 20 students sign up. While we’ll have to wait and see if the new social network catches on, Lifestage was created by someone who truly knows its audience: 19-year-old Facebook employee Michael Sayman, who’s been with Facebook since he got out of high school. He’s been making apps since he was 13 years old, and Mark Zuckerberg personally invited him to join his team.
Sayman says his app “looks back at the days of Facebook from 2004 and explores what can be done if we went back and turned the crank all the way forward to 2016 with video-first.” That certainly aligns with Zuckerberg’s plan to transition his website into a more video-centric network. There’s no word yet on when it’ll come out for Android devices, but iPhone- and iPad-using high schoolers can now download it from iTunes.
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