Facebook Riff

~ the eulogy ~

Riff launched on 1 April 2015 and had to be introduced with a disclaimer that it was real. The idea underneath it was decent and had a specific origin: the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had spent the previous summer proving that a video which names the next person to make one spreads differently than a video that just sits there. Riff was an attempt to build that mechanic into an app instead of hoping for it.

You shot up to twenty seconds and gave the result a title. The title was the instruction, so it read less like a caption and more like a prompt: make a face, or say something to Johnny for his birthday. Your friends could append their own twenty seconds, and once they had, their friends could append after that. A clip started among five people could in principle reach a few thousand without anyone deciding it should.

In principle. Facebook shipped it on both stores, wrote a blog post, and then did close to nothing else. TechCrunch and TIME covered the launch, the app got no meaningful updates for the rest of its life, and it did not appear inside the main Facebook app where a billion people already were. On 7 December 2015 the company ended the Creative Labs program and removed Riff from the App Store and Google Play, with a statement saying the useful parts had already been folded into the main apps.

~ the dossier ~

~ the standalone app problem ~

Creative Labs was Facebook's attempt to behave like a startup with a company attached. Paper came first in early 2014 and was the one people admired. Slingshot followed that June as an answer to Snapchat, Rooms in October as anonymous themed chat, then Riff. All of them shipped as separate downloads, on purpose, so that failure would not embarrass the main product.

What that also meant was that none of them inherited the distribution that made Facebook worth working for. An app with no promotion beyond one blog post is competing on the same terms as two people in a garage, except with worse incentives, because the people building it can see a working product one icon away on the same phone. Slingshot got a rebuild and still lost. Riff never got that far.

~ who it was for ~

Collaborative short video was aimed squarely at people who make videos with their friends for fun, which in 2015 meant teenagers, and I was thirty-one and writing software for a living. I never installed it and neither did anyone I knew, and that is not a regional gap for once. Riff was available in Turkey the day it launched, in the same store as everything else, and it did not matter, because a video app that nobody opens is equally absent everywhere.

~ what survived it ~

The chain-of-contributors idea did not die with the app. Duets, stitches, remixes and the whole grammar of one person continuing another person's video are now standard equipment, and TikTok made them the default rather than a feature you had to go find in a separate download. Facebook was early to the mechanic and late to the only distribution model that could have carried it.

Rooms stayed reachable until 23 December 2015 and Slingshot kept working for people who already had it, so Riff is the one that went first and cleanest. Eight months, one release, no update, no farewell screen. Of the four Creative Labs apps, it is the only one where the shutdown announcement is also the second-largest piece of press it ever got.

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