

Facebook Inc. is developing a new standalone app called “Lasso” to challenge TikTok, a wildly popular Chinese app that has started to go viral in the West.
Facebook is said to be developing the app in an attempt to “win back the attention of teens while capitalizing on its recently attained major label music licenses.”
TikTok, released in 2016 by a Chinese app developer called ByteDance, is primarily used by users for lip syncing music videos but has also evolved to include staged viral content.
TikTok took over Musical.ly, a semipopular short-video-sharing site, in August and immediately rebranded the site, giving it exposure to the U.S. market with rapid success. The app is somewhat similar to Vine, a short-video service acquire by Twitter Inc. in 2012 before it was shut down in 2016, but TikTok has a heavy emphasis on music.
It’s hard to obtain exact numbers, but TikTok is now more popular in Asia than Instagram, according to Tech in Asia. Other reports suggested that it now has more than 500 million users.
Whatever the number, Facebook seemingly sees TikTok as a threat. Lasso is described as “basically TikTok/Musically” and “built for teens, fun and funny and focused on creation.”
Although Instagram has been wildly successful for Facebook and could actually overtake its parent company in user numbers, Facebook itself is suffering a demographic problem with younger users said to be rapidly abandoning the social networking service.
Launching a standalone app that mimics TikTok but is not directly tied to Facebook is apparently seen as a way for the company to win back younger audiences.
Copying Snapchat worked well for Instagram, but standalone apps launched by Facebook have not previously been successful. The company launched “Lifestage,” a video-based app for teens in August 2016 that was shut down a year later.
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