Facebook's Instagram Launches TikTok Copycat in Political Storm (bloomberg.com) 49
Facebook's Instagram photo-sharing app is launching its clone of TikTok in more than 50 countries, a week after Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg defended the company's copycat strategies to U.S. lawmakers at an antitrust hearing. From a report: The product, called Reels, lets people edit 15-second clips of videos together alongside music, just like on TikTok. It will be embedded into Instagram in the U.S. and elsewhere, the company said Wednesday in blog post. Reels is the second major Instagram feature that follows an almost identical one popularized by a competitor. Instagram Stories, the tool for posting videos and photos that disappear, was inspired by Snap. Reels isn't Facebook's first attempt at challenging TikTok. Facebook's Lasso, a separate application with similar features that was tested in limited markets, was shut down last month after it failed to win over an audience. Reels may have better luck: it's launching just as TikTok's existence in the U.S. is being challenged by President Donald Trump.
What's TikTok ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Somebody please translate for us old people. /. ?
What's a TikTok and why is it so important to warrant a 1st page post on
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TikTok is a stupid application for teenagers to share short videos. You probably heard of Vine. Same thing. Vine died a fiery death and everybody moved to TikTok apparently.
The problem is that TikTok is chinese owned, and you know how the chinese government is. India wants to ban it because it's basically government spyware. The US same. Europe I don't know but I suspect it's on the table.
Re:What's TikTok ? (Score:4, Interesting)
TikTok is a popular video site that attracts mostly young people. It hosts brief videos. It's run by a Chinese company, which is enough for politicians to spread some manufactured outrage about China spying on the goofy dance moves of our pure-blooded American teens.
Trump wants to shut it down, for his own lack of reasons, and expects to somehow extort money from the company while getting it taken over by an American company.
The TikTok audience is entirely unlikely to be happy with Trump for his bizarre shenanigans.
The government needs to take Facebook's excessive conglomerate apart back into individual companies but, that's a slightly different topic.
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Tik Tok had a meteoric rise, which doesn't happen in dictatorships without the blessing of the elites, which is to say, their fingers are in the pie, clearing the red tape.
This kicks them in the nuts as arm-twisting for negotiations. This kind of thing is done all the time, and the memes used as legal justification are cover stories.
You don't think EU bans of US beef are really about hyper-rare mad cow disease, do you?
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Hell, I downmod you merely for having the sig. I'm a 'murican. Nobody tells me what to do.
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Trump forcing TikTok into US ownership is extremely dangerous brinksmanship. What if China responds by saying Microsoft has to become Chinese-owned if they want to sell their products inside China?
TikTok - spyware - ex clipboard monitoring (Score:3, Interesting)
It's run by a Chinese company, which is enough for politicians to spread some manufactured outrage about China spying on the goofy dance moves of our pure-blooded American teens.
TikTok was found to be constantly extracting the contents of the clipboard. This makes it a spyware vector for a device to partially leak data from any app that supports copy/paste.
This is just one example of spyware behavior found.
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TikTok was found to be constantly extracting the contents of the clipboard. This makes it a spyware vector for a device to partially leak data from any app that supports copy/paste. This is just one example of spyware behavior found.
So did LinkedIn, you know owned by Microsoft!
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TikTok was found to be constantly extracting the contents of the clipboard. This makes it a spyware vector for a device to partially leak data from any app that supports copy/paste. This is just one example of spyware behavior found.
So did LinkedIn, you know owned by Microsoft!
The clipboard issue debunks the claim that only dance moves were at risk.
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Somebody please translate for us old people. What's a TikTok and why is it so important to warrant a 1st page post on /. ?
Don't worry about it. It will be dead and replaced by something else in a few months.
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So, short videos set to a soundtrack—I think a lot of the initial uptake was that it always had a catchy tune in the background that you didn't have to supply yourself. It means a lot of dancing memes, but very often people just put in their own sounds.
Here's the nerdy part: it has no real social graph, the feed is wholly algorithmically generated, and you get to the next one by flicking up from the bottom (otherwise it just loops the one you're watching). That means that it has its own interaction mo
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It's a mobile app devised by the Lizard People Who Live in the Deep Earth to corrupt our youth and ruin their brains.
It's also, probably, an app that brings much joy to perverts and pedophiles.
If you discover your teenager using TikTok, it's time to collect your beans and ammo and head for the bunker. The End Times are nigh.
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Here's how you "get it."
1) Find a link to some tiktok video that you can understand - maybe a meme about some TV show/movie/anime you like, or a political video that you agree with at least a little. This is like a gateway drug. You don't have to like it, but at least you get it a little bit.
2) Follow a recommended link to something slightly cringier. It should make you feel like that scene in "There's something about Mary" where the guy gets his nuts stuck in his zipper on prom night. Cringe! ugh.. ooh
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Somebody please translate for us old people.
(picks up mouse, holds it up in front of face) Hello, computer!
What's a TikTok and why is it so important to warrant a 1st page post on /. ?
What's a google, and why have you forgotten it exists?
Facebook or the Chinese Government? (Score:2)
Who do you trust more? I'm having a hard time seeing who would be better...
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Easy: Facebook is not a brutal murderous genocidal totalitarian regime. The chinese government is.
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But! But! But Facebook is going to sell my personal data so that other companies can attempt to advertise to me. This just cannot stand! /s
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Which affects someone living in USA more? Facebook or Chinese government?
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Facebook is not a brutal murderous genocidal totalitarian regime.
Yet.
zuckerberg's ZikZock (Score:2)
Who do you trust more? I'm having a hard time seeing who would be better...
Oh come on. it's not trust it's control. As long as Z lives in the US, there's the ability to control it, audit it, etc...
Cut out the middle man (Score:1)
Just gas all the users of these piles of crap. Problem solved.
Why would it fare any better? (Score:1)
Facebook's Lasso, a separate application with similar features that was tested in limited markets, was shut down last month after it failed to win over an audience. Reels may have better luck: it's launching just as TikTok's existence in the U.S. is being challenged by President Donald Trump.
Most TikTok users probably have not heard anything about the political issues around TikTok - they just use it because it is fun. Are there reasons why people might actually switch to Reels over TikTok, based on featur
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Not in this case, no... except for perhaps the convenience of being more directly tied to facebook and having native interoperation with it.
In particular, I noticed that the facebook app evidently has a hard upper limit of 15 seconds for a video clip, and while this is the default limit in TikTok, i think there is an option in TikTok to extend that to be as long as a minute.
If you are going to try to launch a competitor to an already immensely popular service, the absolute *BARE MINIMUM* standard shoul
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has a hard upper limit of 15 seconds for a video clip, and while this is the default limit in TikTok, i think there is an option in TikTok to extend that to be as long as a minute.
That's really interesting, I've not used TikTok so I didn't realize they had longer options... I totally agree it seems crazy to release a competitor that is more restricted than the original!
I think it will be as big of a hits as Google+ (Score:2)
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Obviously ByteDance, owners of TikTok, made the mistake of exporting their IP to the USA where it was immediately cloned. As soon as the American saw it they started working on a copy.
That was a parody, by the way. In case anyone doesn't get it.
Actually Twitter already had a TikTok clone. It was called Vine and shut down a year before TikTok launched. As with most things in tech the ideas are old and were repeatedly stolen and slightly improved upon.
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That's the way of tech. Sure everyone's seen https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1... [imdb.com] Pirates of Silicon Valley.
A poor copy, if you ask me (Score:3)
Tiktok defaults to 15 seconds clips, but I believe that there is an option to allow clips of up to 60 seconds.
It does not appear that this new app has any functionality at all for the latter.
I think a service similar to tiktok that has wholly different ownership is a good idea, but I think if a would-be competitor is unable to at least match the features of what is already an incredibly popular platform, then the masses are not likely to migrate to it, and I think it will be dead before the year is out unless they get on the ball to address the shortcomings, and quickly.
People love limitations (Score:2)
People love limitations. It's like the new generation of everything is what we already had, but with some pointless artificial limitation.
Twitter: A blogging site that only supports really short blog entries.
Vine/Tiktok/Reel: A video sharing site that only allows really really short videos.
App: Software that always runs full-screen and has less functionality than the previous version.
What could the next "big" thing will be. Maybe a word processor that only supports the characters A-M? Or a photo-editing
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I totally know what you mean: Limitations are why people make pixel art video games with chip tunes, or make a game for the Commodore-64 in 2020. It's why people sometimes paint with just one color. It's why people take photographs in B&W. Limitations can be great!
The problem is that this isn't art.
People are trying to use these things for real work because they are free, accessible, and popular. But the limitations suck and real work can't get done. If people spend enough time on them then the rea
The US is back in the game of ... (Score:2)
stealing from other country, like it has done for about 200 years [jstor.org].
Especially at the time the US is also drumming up the same accusation against China.
Hypocrite at its ugliest.
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Yup, the only country that has hypocrites, or has ever taken a hypocritical action!
And yeah, really ripping off an app that shares short videos.
A) that's moronic B) those apps have existed all over in various forms.
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Yeah, because TikTok isn't a copy of Vine or anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And from that same article:
Instagram added 15-second video sharing in June 2013.
So even Instagram already had this capability since before TikTok existed. TikTok isn't doing anything cutting edge or groundbreaking in any way. It has just become the thing that kids are using these days due to those various flighty and finicky viral social networking movements.
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It is about combination of features, recommendation engine, user experiences. else why would Facebook bother to copy and why Isntagram lost when it got a head-start.
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But the US hasn't committed genocide recently and China has, so according to many posters here, China is worse.
the US has committed genocide recently [wikipedia.org] and claim(*) China has done the same, so according to many western misinformation here, China is not worse.
(*) like they had claimed about Iraq WMDs before Iraq War. Pathological liar does not change.