Facebook launches Riff, a new video collaboration tool

Video has become increasingly important to Facebook, as views have exploded over the last year

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Somewhat stealthily, I would say, video has become extremely important part of Facebook. Even though it is likely not what most of think of when someone mentions Facebook, many people actually do use it to create, and share, their own video creations. 

This being a social network, the next logical step is to make the act of creating those videos a social experience. So Facebook has introduced Riff, a tool for friends to share idea and collaborate on video.

"Having fun with friends is at the heart of the Facebook experience. Recently, a few Facebook employees stayed after-hours to work on a side project. Our hunch was that if you could make videos collaboratively, the creative process would be more fun and the final product would be cooler," the company said.

Here is how it works: all a user has to do is create a video, and then give it a topic, for example #MarchMadness or #AprilFoolsDay. The user then shares that video with their friends, who can add in their own clips. From there, that person's friends can also add to the video, and out from there it goes, until potentially all of Facebook can be adding to something that one person created.

Here is an example of a Riff that Facebook put up in the post. I'm sure that there will be much better examples in the future, but you get the idea.

Riff the latest stand-alone app to come from Facebook in the last year or so, as it tries to become the go-to for a bunch of different services on your phone.

That has included the release self-destruct messaging app, and Snapshot clone, Slingshot, as well an anonymity app, echoing services like Whisper and Secret, called Rooms. In addition, it also bought fitness tracking app Moves and developed its own reader app, to give users top news, called Paper. And it launched Groups, which allows people to share information with small numbers of people, such as family or college friends, without sharing it with everyone else.

The company also released its own professional network, called Facebook At Work, earlier this year.

And, of course, there was the decoupling of Messenger last year, which has resulted in the company recently opening it up to developers with 40 new apps, along with a peer-to-peer payment feature. 

Video is especially important to Facebook, though. In January the company revealed that, in just the last year, the number of video posts per person has increased 75% globally. That number is even higher, 94%, in the United States. That has amounted to the number of videos, from both users and from advertisers, increased 3.6 times in that span.

Facebook has over 1.2 billion users, and now more than half of them watch at least one video day. Even more impressive is that 76% of Facebook users in the U.S. say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook.

Since July of last year, Facebook has been seeing over one billion views every single day, with 65% of those views occurring on a mobile device.

This is all really important for Facebook, because according to a report out from Business Insider in July of last year, video ad revenue is set to grow faster than any other medium, save for mobile. They will reach nearly $5 billion in 2016, nearly doubling from $2.8 billion in 2013.

With numbers like that, it’s almost a no-brainer to give people even more incentive to interact with videos on the site. 

(Image source: 321riff.com)