Facebook’s new teens-only app Lifestage turns bios into video profiles

Another Snapchat Stories clone. But!

"it mimics the way Facebook was originally launched — school by school"

"you select your high school, and will then see the video profiles from people at your school or ones nearby"

"While technically anyone can download Lifestage, anyone 22 or older will only be able to see their own profile. That's because it's built for high schoolers to learn more about their classmates. A quick swipe lets you block and report people too in case anyone sketchy tries to creep on the kids."

This gating is really interesting and mimics the feature of Snapchat that makes it so that all interaction is friends-only-by-default. This is crucial because other social networking and/or popularity apps are usually public-by-default or encourage it heavily by the nature of the content (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine), which extends popularity contests globally, and separately, makes unsavory interactions with strangers more likely.

In other words, it's possible that this particular set of attributes, which keeps it grounded in the immediate, existing peer group of teens, will result in its long-term success.

reminds me of an old parent trying to pretend that they understand their teenage kids. fb is going to be irrelevant to the next generation. i always tell people that their death is going to be by 1000 cuts the same way that yahoo did.

there are already several very successful social apps/products (snapchat, pinterest, twitter) that aren't owned by fb and there are going to be many many more in the coming years that will each divert a small bit of attention away from fb. eventually it will all add up. ironically many of these social apps/platforms are going to be inspired by wanting to follow zuckerberg's success and are going to turn down acquisition offers (see snapchat).

i genuinely think that they should follow google's lead and invest in areas outside of their core product. creating their own cell phone network (like how google is with internet service) would be a great investment for them. this will allow them to continue to mine people's data while also expanding their product line, and thus reducing the damage that the future social apps are going to do. keeping all their eggs in one basket is a terrible long term strategy.