Facebook’s Newest App Riff Lets Friends Add Clips To Collaborative Videos

Use Facebook’s Riff App Friends Add Clips

You could start the next Harlem Shake-style crowdsourced video phenomenon with Facebook’s new app Riff, out today worldwide in 15 languages on iOS and Android.

Shoot a video of up to 20 seconds in Riff, and give it a title that instructs others what they should add to it like “Make A Funny Face” or “Birthday Wishes For Johnny” or “Adventures Of Mr. Banana.” Friends will see the video on Riff and get a notification inviting them to contribute, with each clip tacked on at the end. The contributors’ friends are then invited to add scenes, too.

Facebook’s Riff Product Manager Josh Miller says “The potential pool of creative collaborators can grow exponentially from there, so a short video can become an inventive project between circles of friends you can share to Facebook or anywhere on the Internet.”

Here’s a look at what it’s like to use Riff:

Riff is the latest Facebook Creative Labs project following other experiments in app design like Paper, Slingshot, Mentions, Rooms and Groups. Like those, even if it doesn’t gain mass traction, it could teach Facebook what people want, in this case around video. If it does vie for growth, it could boost video creation on Facebook, but will have to compete with fellow collaborative video apps like JumpCam, Vyclone, MixBit, and Snapchat’s Our Stories feature.

Here you can see an example Riff video of the cast of Broadway’s An American In Paris talking to fans from backstage.

A New Meme Generator

Riff all started with people dumping ice water on their heads. Miller, acquired with his startup Branch to build Rooms, says that Riff was inspired by the ALS Ice Bucket challenge, which saw tons of Facebookers posting videos of themselves taking the same cold plunge for charity. Miller says it felt collaborative because you had to be tagged and tag others you wanted to challenge to donate to ALS research and/or get drenched.

My final thesis for my 2009 Stanford cybersociology Master’s degree was actually about these exact kind of memes, like the Harlem Shake and Ice Bucket. If you start a meme with a template that makes it obvious how to remix it by substituting your own content for one of the variables, people flock to creating and sharing their own versions. Subbing in your friends dancing like crazy or you getting frozen drives attention back to the original meme and keeps it alive longer.


The Ice Bucket Challenge helped Facebook grow video views 50 percent from May to July 2014 to hit 1 billion per day. If Facebook could build a tool to catalyze and host these viral video explosions, it could soak up huge amounts of video engagement, allowing it to slide in lucrative video ads. So a few employees at Facebook’s London office including Miller starting working on Riff in their after-hours over beers.