Facebook kills its Lifestage app

Do you remember Lifestage? Well, probably not unless you were a teenager and did your high-schooling in the United States. Lifestage was unveiled last year in August for the high-school students under the age of 20. However, the platform didn’t work out — partly because of the 20-year age limit and partly because of Snapchat’s ever-growing popularity.

Lifestage was supposed to be “the” social network for high-school students. If eligible, one could make a video profile and share it with friends, just like Snapchat. In fact, it shared videos from a user to everyone — there was no option to enhance privacy on your posts. Unlocking Lifestage was also a critical activity — you could only use Lifestage if at least 20 people from your school under the age of 20 activated their accounts on Lifestage.

All of these restrictions meant that Lifestage could only achieve a few members over the course of time. The app stopped receiving updates a few months ago before the company announced its closure.

“We originally launched Lifestage to make it easier for teens in the US to connect with others at their school by creating a video profile with content for all of the things that make up their identity. Teens continue to make up an important part of the global community on Facebook, and we’ve learned a lot from Lifestage. We will continue to incorporate these learnings into features in the main Facebook app,” said Facebook’s official statement.

Snapchat’s unrestricted controls for the users along with constant updates and the first-mover advantage in this segment let no chance for Facebook’s attempt. However, the company says that they will be incorporating the learnings from the app into the main Facebook app. We can only hope that they don’t mess up the main app with irrelevant bloatware.

(source)