Facebook Lifestage

~ the obit ~

i could not have used lifestage even if i had wanted to. it was built for high school students, and anyone twenty-two or older was locked out of everything except their own profile. in 2016 i was a thirty-two-year-old engineer in ankara, which is about as far outside its target as a person can be.

the app has a good story attached to it. it was made by michael sayman, who joined facebook as a teenager after building popular apps on his own, and who was nineteen and a product manager when he shipped lifestage in august 2016. the idea was to rebuild the old facebook profile for people who had never wanted a text one. instead of typing your likes, you filmed short videos answering prompts, and your school's feed was other kids doing the same.

it was aimed squarely at snapchat, and it missed. lifestage never found an audience, drawing somewhere in the low thousands of installs across its whole life, a rounding error at facebook's scale. facebook removed it from the app store on august 4, 2017, almost exactly a year after launch. sayman went on to a long career. the app did not.

from where i sat it was invisible, a us teen app i would only ever read about. but it is a clean little example of how hard the teen social market was even for the company that had once owned it. facebook could buy instagram and copy snapchat inside instagram, yet a standalone app for teenagers, made by an actual teenager, still could not get anyone to show up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the teenager who built it ~

the most memorable thing about lifestage is who made it. michael sayman was a self-taught developer who got hired at facebook young on the strength of his own hit apps, and lifestage was his big swing from inside the company. that a nineteen-year-old was handed a standalone product aimed at his own age group says a lot about how badly facebook wanted to understand the teenagers it was already losing.

~ what it was really about ~

lifestage was one of a run of experiments facebook threw at the same problem, that young people were moving to snapchat and would not come to a facebook-branded app to be found. some of those bets were folded into instagram and worked. the standalone ones, lifestage among them, mostly did not. the lesson facebook took was to stop making teen apps called facebook and start copying features into instagram, which is the strategy that actually held.

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