Facebook has launched another video camera app. Riff for the iPhone and Android allows collaborative looping video creation – a bit like Twitter’s Vine on steroids.
The free app allows one user to record a short clip similar to a Vine or Instagram video and publish it within the app or Facebook. Other users can then find and add to that clip with their own short clip, building a longer video that loops through.
The idea is that a collaborative story can be told across multiple view points and clips based around a topic.
Riff is the latest from Facebook’s creative labs, the social network’s internal app creation arm, responsible for the recent Slingshot, Mentions, Paper, Rooms and Facebook Groups apps.
Video capture and photography are the latest fiercely competitive battlegrounds, which are seeing big and small technology companies battle it out to be the next big platform.
Facebook, for instance, now has not one but six separate apps dedicated to the fields across its different platforms.
Live broadcasting video app Meerkat’s launch, which was quickly killed by the launch of Twitter’s own version Periscope, demonstrates how hotly contested the space is.
The meteoric rise of Instagram, Vine and SnapChat shows that content creation is at least flavour of the month.
Whether Riff will survive past being a novelty will depend on whether it is actually fun to use. It has one advantage over some of the newer apps such as Periscope in that it is available for both Apple’s iPhone and Android and therefore has a much larger potential market.
• Meerkat and Periscope: will live-streaming apps transform news?
