INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Facebook Lasso has a steep uphill climb ahead as it hopes to chase the musical video app it cloned, China TikTok (which merged with
Lasso lets you overlay popular songs on 15-second clips of you lip syncing, dancing or just being silly — kind of like Vine with a
It off to a slow start since launching Friday, having failed to reach the overall app download charts as it falls from No
iOS Photo and Video App chart, according to App Annie
Sensor Tower estimates Lasso has been downloaded fewer than 10,000 times across both iOS and Android.
Forme Facebook Lead Product Designer
Brady Voss
And now one of the Lasso team bosses, Brady Voss, is leaving Facebook for a job at Netflix
He&d spent five years as a lead product designer at Facebook working on standalone apps like Hello and major feature launches like Watch,
Live, 360 video and the social network smart TV app
He previously designed products for TiVo and Microsoft Xbox.
&After five life-changing years at Facebook, my last day will be this Friday,
11/16,& Voss wrote on Facebook
&Following our launch of our new app, Lasso, a project I&ve been working on for a while now, the timing works well to explore what coming
As for what next I have accepted a position at Netflix in Los Gatos, California.& A Facebook spokesperson responded that &Yes, I can confirm
thatBradyis leaving Facebook.&
Voss added some color about joining Facebook, noting, &There was actually a discussion about whether or not
I&d be a great culture fit because I wore a tie to my interviews&which is funny because we don&t believe dressing like that is what enables
people to bring their best everyday
Thankfully, they saw past the common clichés&because suits and ties are not me.& As for Facebook troubles, he wrote that &I was even there
for the big freak out moments along the way&we&ll keep them unnamed
&, which could refer to his work on Facebook Live that spawned big
problems with real-time broadcasts of violence and self-harm.
While it reasonable for anyone to want a change of pace after five years,
especially after the brutal year Facebook had in the press, his departure just a week after Lasso launch doesn&t inspire a ton of confidence
It might have been a sensible stopping point haven gotten the app out the door, but you&d also think that if Lasso had a real shot at
popularity, he&d have wanted to stick around to oversee that growth.
Lasso first rodeo
TechCrunch first broke the news last month that Lasso
was in development, citing Voss as one of the team heads
But in the meantime, the world highest valued private startup ByteDance managed to push itsTikTok app past Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube
iOS overall charts and No
1 in Photo and Video.Facebook seems to have shooed Lasso out a little prematurely before losing more ground, given it lacks many of the
augmented reality features and filters found in Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok .
Facebook Lasso
TechCrunch asked the company for some more
details about the Lasso roadmap
A spokesperson told me that Facebook will be evolving Lasso and adding new features with time, and may test a feature for uploading videos
instead of being restricted to shooting them in-app right now
Voss& departure post includes a &Made With Lasso& video featuring an augmented reality effect with him conjuring Facebook Like thumbs-ups
[Update: He tells me he added this in AfterEffects, but it shows that Facebookers think AR should be part of Lasso.]
As for monetization,
Facebook tells me there are no plans to show ads right now
Typically, Facebook tries to build products to have hundreds of millions of users before it potentially endangers growth by layering in
I asked if users might be able to pay their favorite video creators with tips, and the company says that while that not currently available,
it hopes to explore ways to allow creators to earn money in the future
Instagram said the same thing about IGTV when it launched in June, and we still haven&t heard anything on that front
Facebook likely won&t be able to lure creators to new platforms with smaller audiences than their main channels unless it going to let them
earn money there.
If Facebook is truly serious about challenging TikTok, it may need to build closer ties between Lasso and Instagram
Facebook left its previous standalone video apps like Slingshot and Poke out to dry, eventually shuttering them after providing little
Given the teen audience Lasso craves is already on Instagram, it will be fascinating to see if former VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri, who now
running Instagram, will insert some links to Lasso
A Facebook spokesperson says that Facebook may investigate promoting Lasso on its other apps down the line.
And one final concern regarding
Lasso is that Facebook isn&t doing much to prevent underage kids below 13 from getting on the app
Tweens flocked to Musically, leading to some worrisome content
Ten-year-old girls in revealing clothing singing along to the scandalous lyrics of pop songs frequently populated the Musically leaderboard
That prompted me to question Musically CEO Alex Zhu onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015 about whether his app violated the Child
Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that prohibits online services from collecting photos or videos of kids under 13
He denied wrongdoing with flimsy excuses, claiming parents were always aware of what kids were doing, and stormed out of the backstage area
after our talk.
Facebook launches Lasso, its music and video TikTok clone
So I asked Facebook how it would prevent such issues on Lasso,
where all content is public and adults can follow children
A spokesperson told me that you need a Facebook or Instagram account to sign up for Lasso, and those services require people to be 13 older
But &require& isn&t exactly the right word
It asks people to state they&re of age, but doesn&t do anything to confirm that.Lasso does have a report button for flagging inappropriate
content, and the company claims to be taking privacy and safety seriously.
But if the tech giants are going to build apps purposefully
designed for young audiences, asking for kids to merely promise they&re old enough to join may not be sufficient.
