Last year, Facebook let users record short videos to animate their profile photos, but now the company is taking the personalization to another level.
On Tuesday, the social network announced that iOS users will be able to also use short videos from partners like Instagram, Cinemagraph Pro from Fixel, MSQRD, Vine, lollicam, and BeautyPlus. Additionally, Facebook is making the software tools for this publicly available so that other developers can also take part.
And the move is not surprising: Every day, Facebook profile pictures get more than 4.5 billion views and nearly 30 million updates, according to the company. That means we’re about to see a lot of GIF-like silly profile photos.
Last month, Facebook acquired Masquerade, the company behind popular mobile app MSQRD for taking selfies and adding visual effects like celebrity hair dos and cartoons characters. The deal was an obvious move to help Facebook better compete with ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, whose various selfie decorating and animating tools are a huge hit with its users.
For more about Facebook’s event, watch:
Looking at the bigger picture, video has become an increasing focus for Facebook, which is encouraging users and companies to upload video to its social network to compete against YouTube. During the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook product chief Chris Cox said that more than 70% of mobile Internet traffic is expected to be from video in a few years. In addition to uploading video, Facebook (FB) is also promoting live video broadcasting through Facebook Live, its rival to Twitter’s Periscope, among others. At its conference, the company said it’s releasing a tool to make it easier for developers to embed these live streams into their apps.
