Facebook and Masquerade Technologies Help Users To Virtually Swap Faces
Facebook has purchased face swapping application Masquerade to provide new features to users.
Three years ago, Snapchat’s founder Evan Spiegel made headlines when he rejected a $3 billion takeover offer from CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. On March 9, 2016, Facebook announced it was purchasing Masquerade, which is a very famous application which allows users to swap faces virtually. With the help of the recently purchased app, special effects can be applied to videos and selfies, similar to the filters offered on SnapChat.
The social network company is not new to making features that look like other applications, introduced a clone of Snapchat known as Slingshot – a feature known as “On This Day” that is surfacing one’s old posts on the social network and appears to look like an app known as Time Hop.
Like Twitter, the organization is now features “Trending” section inside its homepage, demonstrating personalized groups of stories and trending headlines to users. COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, started referring to the Menlo Park based company as a new “town hall” which does not differ that much from the self-description of Twitter as a “global town square.”
Facebook is not the only one that is taking cues from the rivalry. Recently, Twitter announced to experiment with non-chronological, algorithmic timelines capable of making one’s times feed more just as his or her Facebook News Feed and not that much like an updates’ real-time updates.
Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion four years ago, is reportedly manufacturing mobile advertising strategy like that of Facebook. None of this is being done to implicate one social media company in copying its rival in the industry. In fact, Silicon Valley experiences a moment of social media convergence. After every three months, these organizations must report their own earnings. Investors and shareholders are interested in seeing not only revenue but also growth across the board, rise in monthly or daily active users and user acquisition.
If one feature or tactic appears to work especially well for an organization, another might plunge into it to find it also helps its cause as well. At the end, users move to Twitter for a particular experience they are unable to get anywhere else – as they are doing with Facebook for one particular experience they are unable to get anywhere else.
If these technology companies all begin to resemble one features amalgam, it could finally cost them. Masquerade technologies CEO Eugene Nevgen noted that while his organization merges with the social network the application would keep running and stay up.
