Facebook Has Just Launched A TikTok Competitor App Called Lasso

Facebook has just quietly launched a new app - Lasso which lets people create short videos. This app video is probably Facebook’s attempt to fight against massive popularity of TikTok, the short-video app that has just merged with ByteDance’s Musical.ly. Facebook is trying to win over teenager users, who Facebook has been losing. This year, only about half of teenagers say that they are still using Facebook, more than 20 percent less than what they said in 2014, at 71 percent.

This new Facebook’s Lasso allows users to record video of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to music, pretty much the same as what TikTok is offering. Users can also record short video clips like Vines. You can now download it in both Android and iOS platform.

You can create a new account using Facebook or sign in using through the Instagram. The app will request your authorization to access your photos, profile page and videos as well. In Lasso, you can watch plenty of short video clips which autoplay when you scroll through them. On the bottom, videos’ hashtag will be prominently displayed, and as commonly seen on other social media sites, you will be able to use tags to filter the content. You can also share videos on Lasso as a Facebook story and Facebook promised to allow users to share those video as Instagram stories soon. And for now, you can’t set your Lasso profile private.

Still, Facebook’s Lasso might be late here

There is already a tons of content on the app already, similar to the content on Facebook Watch during its launch, indicating that there should have been many people having beta access to the app. Still, it would be several years late for Facebook to enter this segment with Lasso. TikTok aka Douyin in China has already been up and running since 2016.

Facebook has been quiet about its Lasso’s launch, not a single statement on its main website. There were also two tweet from two product managers of Facebook announcing the app’s launch. The first belonged to Andy Huang - product manager of Facebook and followed that was Bowen Pan, product manager for the app Lasso itself.