Facebook used to be hugely popular with teenagers but over the years, the company has not been able to win over teenage users and one of the big reasons has been the emergence of Snapchat. It is because of this reason that the company released a new app, named Lifestage, that can be used for sharing photographs as well as videos and the company feels that it could help them in attracting more teenages users.
A report in Fortune Magazine stated, "The social network on Friday introduced yet another app for sharing photos and videos intended to challenge its fast-growing rival Snapchat and its popularity with teens. The new app, Lifestage, is intended for teens for posting photos and videos, as well as to express their likes and dislikes, emotions, and friendships. The app opens directly to a camera screen, a signaling its focus on photos, and lets users browse the profiles of their school classmates (it's currently invite-only on iOS, and each school needs 20 users to become active)."
An app developer at Facebook named Michael Sayman spoke about how the new site was inspired from Facebook's older versions. He spoke to Mashable about the app and said, "What if we were to grab what Facebook from 2004 was and bring it to 2016 and bring it into what we've been trying to understand with video and content creation," The report on Fortune further added, "Up until now, Facebook's attempts to clone Snapchat have been to largely recreate the same features and look of the app. It was as if teens would be won over by simply creating a silly-seeming photo and video app. Those efforts over the past few years-Poke, Slingshot, Riff-didn't catch on.
But Sayman's observation that the idea behind the original Facebook should be translated into today's technology and how youth interact shows a departure in the company's approach. Just like Snapchat capitalized on young users' new desire for non-permanent communication and self-expression through disappearing photos and messages, Lifestage is an attempt to capitalize on one of its own main features: user profiles where they can post information about themselves and photos and videos."
