Facebook Moments – Get Ready for This!

Love it or hate it, there will be a whole heap of photo movie montages coming your way very soon.

Just a few months since launching their Moments app, Facebook have now added a video feature that could help them reach viewing figures similar to YouTube. The concept is to take those long lost photos gathering virtual dust inside your phone and turn them into your own personal movie montage including music soundtrack of your choice.

Flipagram has been giving users the ability to create photo-stories combined with soundtrack for a while now. However, Facebook’s weapon of offering its users the unique selling point of being able to share directly onto their timelines without any additional authentication, is a formidable one.

All you need is six or more photographs, a music selection, and the ubiquitous tag your friends feature to share those special moments in your mini movie without all the hassle that typically comes with video editing.

Most people reading this will probably fall into one of two camps. You will either see this as an exciting way of bringing those forgotten photos on your phone to life and ensure that your memories are frozen in time. Alternatively you might feel an inner rage that your timeline will be filled with disingenuous spam and stare into the abyss in disbelief at the level of narcissism that has engulfed our tiny planet.

However, the increasing number of automated options in apps like Moments allow us to unleash our creative side easily with the never ending pile of photos that fill up our smartphones.

Although we don’t think of Facebook as a video sharing website, they have somehow reached over 4 billion video views a day completely under the radar. There have even been debates about how the social media behemoth could soon catch-up with YouTube, which considering their user base is not beyond the realms of possibility if apps like Moments grab people’s attention.

There is an increasing demand for visual content with moving images or video when we are browsing online. If we admit it, it simply helps our content stand out from the white noise frequenting sites such as Facebook and goes a long way in making sharing our memories fun again.

The feature is incredibly easy to use and I’d expect it to become very popular. The only downside is when thousands of similar videos begin to clog up timelines. Typically you might find a handful of early adopters that will post a video that sparks the curiosity of other users and before you know it there are thousands of them everywhere as they spread like a virus.

The app is a delight for non-techies and I imagine it will also dramatically increase advertising revenue for Facebook, so I expect Moments to become a huge success. There will also be an increasing number of grumpy people moaning about the influx of videos that it creates and how they hate everything about Facebook and what it represents in modern society.

It seems that Facebook is rapidly becoming everyone’s guilty pleasure where even people who claim to hate it, secretly just can’t seem to remove themselves from its madness.

We all know of a self-righteous person that says they never go on Facebook anymore and will spend a great deal of time telling you why. Though every time you look at your phone it reveals they were last on the app 3 hours ago.

Love it or hate it, there will be a whole heap of photo movie montages coming your way very soon. The question is, will one of them be yours?

Anurag Harsh [other articles] is a founding exec of Ziff Davis (NASDAQ: JCOM), the world's largest tech & gaming digital corp. He graduated (MBA/MS) from Wharton & MIT, has performed two sold out solo concerts at Carnegie Hall and co-authored the McGraw-Hill bestseller “M-Commerce Security”. Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter @anuragharsh