While most of us were watching quietly as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge colonized our News Feeds this summer, Facebook employee Josh Miller noticed that a new kind of social sharing behavior was forming: People were sharing video to Facebook in droves.
“Before, my News Feed was always full of mostly photos and text and links,” Miller told BuzzFeed News. “The Ice Bucket Challenge wasn’t just broadcasting; it was people getting nominated by friends and feeling of people making something together.” During his spare time, Miller and a few co-workers set off to try to capture this collaborative broadcasting in app form. The result is Riff, the first video-specific app from Facebook’s Creative Labs.
The purpose of Riff is to create short clips — anywhere from one to a few seconds, preferably under some kind of theme or “Topic,” and then send them out into the world for friends to add their own clips to create a longer montage-style video. In a demo with BuzzFeed News, Miller showed examples of karaoke riffs taken in the Facebook office, wherein an employee would start out with one line from a song and other employees would join on. One Riff, titled “Wazzzup,” featured Facebook employees, including founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, all doing their best impressions of the infamous catchphrase from a late ’90s Budweiser ad.
