Background
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, has a dream, a vision that makes business sense for the media juggernaut company as well as for a user of his products.
His dream is to unify all his users into a single unified app.
His portfolio includes Facebook, WhatsApp, WhatsApp Business, and Instagram. All of these platforms are world-changers and as essential as electricity for many individuals and businesses all over the world.
Free as in beer, but how?
The contemporary world is one of decreasing attention span and increasing corporate influence.
Before we say anything, it must be appreciated that nothing is free in this world. I repeat, there are no free lunches.
But, any individual or company can access highly advanced software (like Facebook, Gmail and the other services available on the internet) which costs its company a huge sum of money to operate, maintain, and upgrade.
So, why is it free for me? Because, these companies sell their ability to insidiously modify behaviour of its users to anyone who is willing to pay them cash.
For explanation and proof of the same, kindly see The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix.
A word about short videos
When the modification of a user’s behaviour is being sold to the highest bidder in this attention-based economy, then it is natural that the same keeps on decreasing.
Thus, the trend towards videos with smaller and smaller duration is the fallout.
To appease, humour, entertain, and basically trap a person with hits of dopamine, the companies had to adapt and short videos become highly pursued merchandise.
TikTok is an app that has created millionaires off of 60-second videos.
Also read: More than 10K listed companies went bust, claims Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA)
YouTube has been forced to experiment with a feature called Shorts, limiting the video to 60 seconds and promoting the same on a standalone shelf on a user’s YouTube Home page in the app.
A step towards the dream
Now, to go with the flow of (in the views of this author) degradation of humanity, a flow which companies like Facebook helped create, now the short videos created on Instagram are being tested to be shown on the same user’s Facebook News Feed.
Make in India?
An interesting aspect of this testing is that it is being tested on Indian users. Also, the same has not been enabled for all users but a select few.
A Facebook spokeswoman told Reuters, “In India, we’re testing the ability for Instagram creators to choose to have their Reels recommended on Facebook... creators can reach new audiences and people can create and discover more entertaining content.”
TikTok clone?
Experts have opined that the feature will compete with TikTok head-on with the Instagram Reel having the functionality to add special effects and soundtracks.
Final words
When this functionality is tested and if the company decides to roll-out the feature all over the world, then all users will be able to recommend their 30-second long videos (called Reels) on Facebook.