Facebook’s Has Another Snapchat Clone

By @TheMarkDalton

Facebook is no longer considered cool by well…anyone. Even my dear mother no longer has much of an interest in Facebook and prefers Instagram. Facebook is now a website we tend to visit simply because that is where most of us are.

But Facebook wants to be cool, they want to be the place to be and as Snapchat surges ahead, Facebook is trying anything to pull up alongside them. Over the past number of years Facebook has released and then shut down teen centric apps such as Slingshot and Poke.

Recently, Instagram which is owned by Facebook, shamelessly ripped off the stories part of Snapchat and slapped it in their own Instagram app. However they seem to be onto something and the results have been pretty decent so far. Obviously though that wasn’t enough and once again they are going after teens with a new app.

Lifestage has been launched by the social network and is available to download from the App Store. It looks and works a lot like Snapchat, it is basically another carbon copy of Snapchat.

It works by taking a video, slap a picture frame design on top that represents a category or emotion such as like or dislike and post it to the app. The difference seems to be that the videos don’t disappear after 24 hours and if you have visit a friends profile to see their video clips.

The real interesting part is that the app is closed to anyone over the age of 21. Now you can of course lie about your age and get access but it is an interesting move by Facebook to limit the app to teenagers.

I have said in the past that Snapchat has won a generation and when that happens everyone else gets dragged down into it. Snapchat was never limited to a certain age group though. It appears that Facebook realises how important teens are when shaping technology, so what is your best chance to try win a generation? Limit your app to exclusively to that generation.

Lifestage also does not support text messaging which is another interesting gamble considering how big messages are on all of these story telling platforms at the moment. Messages are how you interact on a more personal level but for now they are omitted from Lifestage.

If the early reviews on the App store are anything to go by, this could be another app which could end up in the Facebook trash can. It currently has a 2.5 star rating and some users called it “confusing”, “creepy” and “pointless”.