Now Once Again Facebook is trying to make it more attractive towards teenagers. Company has failed to win the way over teens like snapchat has. This one is different than Poke and Slingshot and all the rest in one important way: it was created by a teenager
At 19, Michael Sayman may be the youngest product manager on staff at Facebook. Despite being only two years out of high school, however, he's already a veteran app developer.
His latest app, Facebook's new video-centric app for iOS that connects high school students with others from their school. Rather than profile photos, the app uses a series of selfies where users can show off their "faces." Users record videos to show off what they like and dislike and who their friends, pets, boyfriends and girlfriends are.
Sayman made his first app at 13 in the early days of Apple's App Store and created several more over the next three years before catching the attention of Facebook, who invited the teenager to its upcoming F8 developer conference. Once there, he landed a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, who must have been impressed with the young developer because he received a job offer from the company shortly after.
At 19, Michael Sayman may be the youngest product manager on staff at Facebook. Despite being only two years out of high school, however, he's already a veteran app developer.
His latest app, Facebook's new video-centric app for iOS that connects high school students with others from their school. Rather than profile photos, the app uses a series of selfies where users can show off their "faces." Users record videos to show off what they like and dislike and who their friends, pets, boyfriends and girlfriends are.
Sayman made his first app at 13 in the early days of Apple's App Store and created several more over the next three years before catching the attention of Facebook, who invited the teenager to its upcoming F8 developer conference. Once there, he landed a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, who must have been impressed with the young developer because he received a job offer from the company shortly after.
Just like Snapchat's friend emoji (R.I.P best friends), Lifestage uses a system of similarly inscrutable emoji characters to indicate how up to date user profiles are (spoiler: the poop emoji is bad.) The numbers next to user names indicate how many profile sections have been filled out. Notably, There are no messaging features or one-to-one interactions — instead, users can post their user name for Snapchat or Instagram or preferred messaging app.
In much the same way the original version of Facebook was limited to students at a handful of universities, Lifestage is limited to high school students — at least for now. Any student at any U.S high school can sign up for the service, which is completely separate from any Facebook account you may have. Any given school, however, will need at least 20 students to sign up and make profiles in order for them to interact with each other.
Whether or not it catches on with the teenage users Facebook has been trying so desperately to reach is another matter. But Sayman says he's not too concerned with that just yet. He recalls that when he was still in high school, he was developing apps to help his family pay bills. That experience, he says, not only helped prepare him to compete in the competitive App Store environment, it gave him a perspective not many teenagers get to experience.
"I had to change my whole goal. I need to make sure we have money to pay for the electricity or to go to the supermarket. That ended up changing a lot of how I looked at the App Store."
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