When people in Canada and Brazil tap on the Facebook app on Friday during the Olympics' opening ceremony, a camera will appear on top of the News Feed, making it easier to take photos and videos and add Olympics-themed filters, frames and masks.(Photo: Facebook)
SAN FRANCISCO — When people in Canada and Brazil tap on the Facebook app on Friday during the Olympics' opening ceremony, a camera will appear on top of the News Feed, making it easy to snap photos and videos and add Olympics-themed filters, frames and masks.
It's the latest example of Facebook's new "video first" philosophy, the belief that moving images will soon subsume words and photographs as the preferred means of sharing personal updates on social media and messaging services. It's also an escalation of growing competition for eyeballs and advertising dollars with the buzzy and youth-friendly mobile app Snapchat.
The idea: to make it easier to shoot photos and videos and give people tools — filters, frames and masks popular on Snapchat — to make status updates more personal and expressive. The masks are from MSQRD, the start-up Facebook bought in March which makes imaging software that jazzes up videos and selfies with fun filters, masks and other special effects.
Facebook says it's testing the concept of putting the camera front and center in its app, much the way Snapchat does. Eventually the giant social network expects to roll out the feature more broadly to its 1.7 billion plus users.
"We are going to learn. That's our main objective," said Facebook product manager Sachin Monga. "We're really excited to see what people think."
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is leading the company-wide push to encourage users to create and share more video.
"Ten years ago, most of what we shared and consumed online was text. Now it's photos. And soon, most of it will be videos," Zuckerberg told analysts during the company's second-quarter earnings call. "We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services."
This time, Zuckerberg is taking aim at the status update, which hasn't changed much over the years. It's still a blank text box with a blinking cursor that asks the question: What's on your mind?
What has changed are sharing habits, especially among young people, who increasingly are peppering updates with a kaleidoscope of doodles, emojis, images and sounds. More than any other, Facebook competitor Snapchat has embraced those changing habits, putting growing pressure on Facebook to rapidly evolve.
The camera on top of News Feed will make it easier to take photos and videos and add Olympics-themed filters, frames and masks. (Photo: Facebook)
Snapchat has been in Facebook's sights for years. The Venice, Calif., upstart rebuffed a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013. Since then Facebook has tried — and failed — to produce Snapchat carbon copies that would catch on with its users while Snapchat grew into a digital juggernaut with 150 million users visiting its app each day.
Competing with Facebook means video and lots more of it. Not only could video draw in more users and keep existing users more engaged, it could also drive significant revenue for Facebook, which is eager to tap into television advertising budgets.
The prominence of the camera in the test in Canada and Brazil "is one piece of a broader strategy to put video at the center of everything," Monga said.
Here, Facebook is taking a page directly from the visual storytelling style made popular by Snapchat. Open Snapchat and you'll find something that looks a lot like your phone's camera app. Snapchat users can jazz up selfies and videos with emojis, doodles or an ever evolving array of filters.
The placement of the camera in the composer is being tested in Brazil and Canada. (Photo: Facebook)
This week Instagram took a stab at a Snapchat-like feature with Instagram Stories, which lets people share photos and videos with followers for up to 24 hours, essentially what Snapchat Stories does.
Facebook's new camera-centric approach to the status update also emulates Snapchat.
"We think Snapchat has done a really good job of making it so their composer is centered around the camera and that's what we want to do as well," Monga said.
Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn @jguynn
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Source: Facebook focuses on camera in News Feed
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