App Intro: Facebook’s New iPhone App ‘Lifestage’

Aimed at teens and adolescents, this new social app focuses on schools and neighbourhoods.

Facebook recently without any fanfare, launched a new social app primarily for teens called “Lifestage”.

Restricted (at this time) for iPhone users, this standalone app is targeted mainly at adolescents — high school kids to be precise, and the age limit is… 21 years. So there!

What’s unique is that it enables users to create their profiles simply by uploading video clips, instead of typing text for their bio.

Other than this bio, the user doesn’t even need to have a Facebook account in order to sign up for this app.

All the users have to do is select their high school and they then get to see video profiles of people from their own schools or neighbouring schools. Any school gets activated when at least 20 people from the same school sign up for the app. “Once your school is unlocked, you can access the profiles of others in your school community (and all over!) so you can get to know people better in your school and nearby schools”, the description of the app reads on iTunes.

Now this is an interesting way to get more users on board. So all kids need to do is to nag their friends into joining Lifestage! That shouldn’t be too difficult!

A personal touch is added to user profiles as the kids are asked to upload videos of their “happy face”, “sad face”, likes, dislikes, peeves, best friend, the way they dance, and other aspects of their character. Lifestage, in turn, strings all these clips together into a video profile which other users can then watch on their app’s social feed.

The whole point of this app seems to be able to know your peeps better!

“Lifestage makes it easy and fun to share a visual profile of who you are with your school network,” the app’s iTunes store description adds.

In the Lifestage feed, users can see people from their school who have recently updated their profiles and can choose to see or skip different sections. In fact, to spice up things, people get ranked at a higher level as they fill in more information in their personal profile.

While the app has been created for people who are 21 and below, there is no real way to verify the age and there is no restriction on who downloads the app on their iPhone and who doesn’t. However, the app does have options to block and report creepy and suspect users or older folks to be precise.

The reason (not the sole reason though), the app is focused on young people seems to be the creator being in the same age group. Lifestage is the brainchild of Michael Sayman, Facebook’s 19 year-old product manager who started coding at the age of 13 and created 4Snaps a photo charades app, before he joined the team at Facebook as an intern and then became a full-time employee.

Sayman along with a group of three engineers and one designer put in their efforts for over two years to come up with Lifestage. “I wanted to work on an app that my demographic would relate to, or at least that my friends would want to use”, Sayman told TechCrunch.

Text messaging apps are all over the place and this is probably why there is no way to contact people directly in Lifestage feed. Sayman explains “my friends and I have a bajillion messaging apps we already use and love, so what’s the point of having another messaging app? It just seems annoying to me”. So this is why users get a “Reach Me” line of text that appears just beneath their name, whereby they can display their Snapchat or Instagram handle, or any other possible means to contact them.

Sayman has made sure to make this app unique in every which way!

The whole concept behind Lifestage goes with what Mark Zuckerberg stated as a goal of putting video at the heart of all of Facebook’s apps and services, but it also somehow reflects on the constant tension under the surface over Snapchat’s growing popularity among youth. Facebook has already imitated many of Snapchat’s features in its photo-focused social platform, Instagram. This is of course, after failed attempts on Facebook’s part to purchase Snapchat.

Lifestage can be used to capture the eyeballs of teens, which Facebook is afraid of losing to rival platform, Snapchat. The mere fact that Lifestage app directly leads up to a camera screen immediately when it’s tapped draws attention to the stark similarity between Snapchat and Lifestage. Rather than directly copy-pasting features from Snapchat onto Instagram, Facebook is using Lifestage to offer a tailored version of it.

While Lifestage seems like an interesting way for teens to connect with their peeps and get to know them better, the app also comes laden with some serious concerns of its own.

The app poses potential threat to the privacy of the teenage users and personal information can also be stolen through this. In sharing all the personal information (likes, dislikes, dance moves etc) kids are naturally exposing themselves to voyeuristic and prying eyes.

Here’s hoping that Lifestage doesn’t meet the same fate as that of other stand-alone apps like Poke, Slingshot, Paper, and Notify did in the past!

Originally published at Chip-Monks.