TikTok vs Facebook

Facebook has announced that it’s shutting down it’s TikTok competitor, Lasso.

When Lasso launched on Product Hunt nearly two years ago, a question was posed:

“Will Lasso still be around in 12 months?”

Some initial reactions from the community:

“Cool design but maybe a little too late to compete with now successful TikTok app“ – Sebastian

“Facebook has a tendency to fail with standalone apps - I don't think anything will be different here” – Rick

“No. FB is copy pasting the features. Might snatch some consumers but won't be able to kill it.” – Avneesh

Although Lasso has outlasted the initial 12 month timeframe, these predictions ultimately came true. But prophesying a new product’s failure is an easy bet. Most products fail. Even those from big co’s like Facebook. And that’s OK. Experimentation is very much a net good, and Facebook’s NPE team continues to try new ideas with Bump, AUX, Whale, and other projects.

It’s also been an interesting week for Facebook’s ad revenue team with large advertisers such as Starbucks and Coca Cola boycotting the company over concerns regarding hate speech. With a gap in their marketing budget perhaps these big co’s will move their ad-spend dollars to TikTok on their newly launched TikTok for Business platform. Although it’s reported that Zuck isn’t that worried.

TikTok has also had its fair share of knock backs this week with news that India has banned the Chinese based company from its app store. With over 200 million users in India, this is a significant blow for the company and one that CEO, Kevin Mayer, is said to be working to address.

What will happen next in the battle of the social media giants? Why not make a prediction over on Forecast, Facebook’s latest product launch that we covered just last week.

RIP Lasso

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