Facebook's New App Riff Puts a Social Spin on Video Editing
How the social network's latest app lets you build videos with friends.
— -- In the evolution of Facebook, first came the status updates. Then the photos. Now comes the videos.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that more people than ever are sharing videos on the website -- and he wants to make it even easier to do so.
Facebook's Riff app hit app stores on Monday and offers a fun and social way to create videos for Facebook using iOS and Android devices.
The app, which is like a collaborative Vine experience, allows users to create videos less than 20 seconds long that can then be posted to Facebook along with hashtags.
The idea is for friends to then jump in and attach their own pieces to the video, creating a collaborative way to tell a longer story.
"The potential pool of creative collaborators can grow exponentially from there, so a short video can become an inventive project between circles of friends that you can share to Facebook, or anywhere on the internet, at any time," Josh Miller, a product manager at Facebook, said in a blog post.
At the F8 Developer Conference last month, Zuckerberg said he believes most of what is shared online in the future won't be text or photos -- it will be video.
Facebook positioned itself to better compete YouTube by recently allowing its video player to be embedded anywhere on the Internet -- providing tremendous new reach.