Facebook has seen a huge growth in video over the past year, and now it wants you to contribute even more random snippets of your life to the social network with a new app, dubbed Riff.
Riff builds on services like Vine, Instagram Video, or Snapchat and allows users to collaborate and add on to a friend's video. A Riff can last up to 20 seconds, so you could film five seconds, post the clip online, and a friend could sign on to record another five seconds, and so on.
"Our hunch was that if you could make videos collaboratively, the creative process would be more fun and the final product would be cooler," Facebook product manager Josh Miller said in a statement.
Riff came out of Facebook Creative Labs, which is also behind apps like Paper, Slingshot, and Stickered. But according to TechCrunch, the idea for Riff emerged from last year's ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. That phenomenon resulted in a 50 percent growth of Facebook's video views, and got some Facebook London employees wondering how they could capitalize on viral videos in the future.
The result was Riff. It will most certainly be full of many forgettable clips of people driving, eating, and doing otherwise mundane tasks. But they don't all need to be hits, and as TechCrunch pointed out, Facebook could start inserting ads into videos if the service gains traction, just as ads were incorporated into Instagram.
"Anyone can start by creating a video. All you have to do is give it a topic, like #AprilFools, then your friends can view it and choose to add their own clips on that topic," Facebook's Miller said. "Once a friend adds a clip to your video, your friend's friends will also be shown the video in Riff and will be able to add to it. 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."
TechCrunch said that you can only add to videos from friends, which cuts down on the chances that your video will be hijacked by a random person (and inappropriate content).
Last year, Snapchat rolled out a similar feature known as "Our Story" that lets people attending the same event contribute photos and/or videos to one big story.
Riff is live on Google Play, and is coming to iOS, but does not appear to be live on the App Store yet.