NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Report: Facebook is working on a standalone camera app to get people to post more
Concerned at the growing popularity of Snapchat (Snapchat, Inc.), Facebook, Inc. is said to be designing its own dedicated camera app, according to a report Monday.
The Wall Street Journal claims the new, as yet unnamed app has been under development by a team in London and allows people to live stream video in addition opening directly into a camera, a la Snapchat.
According to the report, the app is currently only in its early stage of development and may never end up being released.
News that Facebook is developing a standalone camera app doesn’t come as a huge surprise following a report from The Information earlier this month that the company was starting to seriously worry about content creation given that its 1.6 billion users were posting fewer items about their personal lives, with “original broadcast sharing” dropping 21 percent from mid-2015.
The existing Facebook app encourages browsing, not posting, by opening onto the news feed, while complimentary app Messenger encourages directs chats but not status updates; the new app, should it come to fruition, would put content creation front and center by encouraging people to create content for Facebook versus simply consuming it.
Maybe
Expanding into new apps has always been a problem for Facebook with the exception of the wildly successful Messenger, but in the case of Messenger it only became popular due to the fact that Facebook stripped chat out of its main app, forcing people to use it.
Facebook has had a camera app before called simply Facebook Camera, along with a range of other apps including Slingshot, Rooms, and Riff, and if you don’t know what they all did (the camera app aside), you wouldn’t be alone because they were all epic failures.
The key to Facebook being able to deliver a successful standalone camera app will be its ability to make it stand out from the crowd, and the best way to do this will be its feature set: if it’s chasing the Snapchat crowd fun filters are a given, but on top of this it needs to outdo Instagram and all the other existing photography apps out there if it is to be successful; whether Facebook is capable of doing so is a completely different consideration.
Facebook gave no official comment on the report.
Image credit: jaxxxerockwell/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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