Home Technology Facebook is getting the band back together to take on TikTok with their new Collab app

Facebook is getting the band back together to take on TikTok with their new Collab app

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Nothing makes me feel older than seeing how the whole online world seems to be obsessed with TikTok, and yet it’s something that I couldn’t even be bothered to get into. Its success is certainly having a massive impact online, and even inspiring every other tech company to try and do something similar. YouTube has been working on a TikTok rival of its own called Shorts, while Facebook has previously played around with a TikTok-type competitor called Lasso, that didn’t quite work out.

Facebook is back at it again with a new product out today called Collab, that is focusing on collaborative music-making. The idea behind Collab is that you can create short-form videos that are split into three simultaneous sources, so you can perform a single song by playing three different instruments and stitching it all together. Or you and one or two other friends can collaborate together by each supplying one of the three parts.

That may not sound like Tiktok, but these videos for now must first be posted publicly to the Collab feed, where any other user can take it and use it to create a video of their own, adding vocals, guitar or any other beat to it. It’s this latter feature that closely resembles TikTok and showcases where the company is hoping to gather some of that same audience. It’s great to at least see Facebook approach the concept through its own unique lens rather than attempt to just be a straight-up copy of the same idea.

What is nice about Facebook’s idea as well is that it can’t remix any of the previous underlying music from another person and that all creators get credit. Even if you don’t want to add original parts to the songs, you can do a mix of your own by mixing parts from others.

Facebook says you’ll still be able to share these creations to other platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, but only after they are initially posted to Collab. The company says it’s looking into options to save videos created with Collab without first posting them publicly.

Collab is available as an invite-only beta for now, but the company is keen to fast-track this app to more mainstream use if the beta proves successful.

Last Updated: May 28, 2020

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