Facebook launches Lifestage to counter Snapchat

Facebook tackles Snapchat again! The social network has just created Lifestage, an app specifically targeting teens and young adults.

Mark Zuckerberg famous network is still making efforts to counter the competition: to fight Snapchat, Facebook just launched Lifestage, an app on iOS which is primarily aimed at young people. Lifestage positions itself as a service-oriented video. It thus enables users to talk and exchange via some short videos.

Indeed young people aged 20-29 are the core target of the social network and represent 23% of its users. But Facebook has quite some difficulties to attract younger ones. Only 8% of those registered on Facebook are aged 13 – 19 years old. Lifestage is designed for youth between 13 to 21 years.

Even though anyone can download the app, Facebook has found a solution to target more specifically young people: users can first communicate with members who are in the same school or those who leave close to home.

Thus, users can view profiles of all the teens from the school in which they study. The only condition is that at least 20 students are registered on Lifestage, thus helping encouraging users to invite their friends to download the application. To anticipate any drift, Facebook says it cannot guarantee that users are actually going to the very school mentioned in their profile.” There is no need to add contacts manually, because the pupils in the same school directly appear in the news feed. In addition, those who are above 21 years can only see their own profile. Once again, there is no guarantee if the users are saying the truth about their age.

The Lifestage concept recalls Facebook one, with its first version dedicated to American campuses.

The person behind this new application called Michael Sayman. Aged 19, he understands the needs of his fellow young users. Raised in Miami, from parents originated from Bolivia and Peruvia, he began to learn coding by himself at the age of 13 years old. He was fast to develop different applications, some of which have generated several thousands of dollars. This enabled him to support his family which was threatened to be expelled frome the United States.

This fairy tale was noticed by Mark Zuckerberg. The latter spotted the young man and invited him for an internship at the headquarters of Facebook and to participate in the developer conference. Only a few months later, this resulted in Lifestage developed internally by some engineers.

This fairy tale does not indeed means success. The various recent attempts by Facebook to create specific applications have not been so successful. Thus, Poke and Slingshot, the previous attempt to counter Snapchat, or Paper, a news reading application, have all been stopped only a few months after being launched.

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