Facebook launches Lifestage, a social network app for teens

Lifestage: A video app for teenagers from Facebook that allows to post photos, videos and send out ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’

The widely popular social networking site, Facebook currently with 1.71 billion monthly active users is looking to target teenagers by launching a social-media network that only those under the age of 21 can join.

On Friday, Facebook introduced a new app called Lifestage for sharing photos and video that might emerge as rival to Snapchat. With this app, the teenagers can post photos, videos and send out ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’. However, it doesn’t support messaging feature like Snapchat.

Lifestage is a type of video diary where you answer biographical questions about yourself. Instead of providing more of a textual-based experience, the company has focused on video with this new app. The app will ask you to record video snippets of your happy face, sad face, likes, dislikes, best friend, and more that can be viewed by other visiting your profile. Also, you will be able to unlock more questions by answering the former ones already unlocked in your profile. Every time someone updates their page, it shows up in a feed prompting others to check it out.

While anyone can download Lifestage, anyone 22 or older will only be able to see their own profile, as Lifestage is meant for 21 years and below. This is because it is developed for high schoolers to learn more about their classmates. A quick swipe allows you to block and report people too in case anyone sketchy tries to creep on the kids.

The sign-up process is not synced with Facebook per say. You need to select your high school and you will then see video profiles of people at your school and the ones nearby. Only once 20 people from your school are using Lifestage, it will show you other people for added virality. In that way, you pester your friends to join. In that way, it imitates the way Facebook was originally launched — school by school.

The brain behind the app is a 19-year-old Facebook product manager, Michael Sayman who first started learning to code at the tender age of 13. After building photo charades app 4Snaps, getting invited by Mark Zuckerberg to present at F8, and finally interning at Facebook, Sayman came up with the idea for Lifestage, which he has been working on for the past two years.

He says that lifestage’s design was inspired by old versions of Facebook itself back when users didn’t run the risk of having their posts seen by their parents or other family members, while also making the app more relevant to the times by making it focused on video.

LifeStage works in a way very much similar to Facebook. “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,” Sayman told Mashable.

With this new app, Facebook is clearly trying to lure in the audience that has strayed towards Snapchat’s widely popular service. Earlier this month, Facebook owned Instagram was upgraded with the feature of ‘stories’ that allows users to share reels of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.

Currently, the app is available only on iOS, and hopefully an Android version should be available at some point in the future.