In 2018, a video-sharing social
media app that was originally launched in 2016 for the Chinese market became
fully available worldwide after merging with Musical.ly, another Chinese-founded
app. ByteDance’s app, TikTok, immediately charmed a global user-base thanks to
its addictive feature of making short clips of music and lip-sync videos with
neat camera effects. The fact however that the China-based app could also
potentially gather data on user location, biometrics and imaging that could be
freely accessed by the Chinese communist government has led to efforts by some
countries, including the US, to ban it. While TikTok is legally embattled, some
existing social media apps have been conceptualizing possible alternatives.
One of these is longtime US-based
photo/video-sharing platform (and Facebook subsidiary) Instagram. And as The Verge would have it, they have
released a new feature for their social media service that rather feels like a
competitor to TikTok. This feature is called “Reels,” and it was launched by
Instagram in initially 50-plus countries this past Wednesday, August 5,
available for both iOS and Android. The deal is the same as TikTok: short
videos 15 seconds long, with music and effects, shareable with friends and
searchable through the Instagram Reels library.
There are of course enough
differences between Reels and Tiktok so as not to be taken for a mere copy.
Registering for Reels gives the option of making the account public or private.
Public accounts will have created videos available for browsing on the
platform, while private account videos can only be shared to the user’s
Instagram feed and Stories. And as stated before, Reels is not a separate app
from Instagram but a fully integrated feature of it, using the same filters and
tools in an integrated environment, similar indeed to Instagram Stories, which was
their answer to Snapchat.
To say that TikTok’s parent
company ByteDance, based in Beijing, is concerned about Instagram Reels is
selling things short. The company actually accused Instagram’s own parent
Facebook of app plagiarism, though Instagram product director Robby Stein
insists the two platforms are distinct. While Stein does credit ByteDance for
popularizing the short video format that made TikTok so viral, he is of the
opinion that “no two products are exactly alike.”
Come September 15, if a bid by
Microsoft to acquire TikTok from ByteDance falls through, then the app will be
officially banned in the US, just as it is already banned in India last June.
Image courtesy of Business Insider
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