Soon it won’t just be for celebrities anymore: Facebook confirmed to Josh Constine of TechCrunch that verified profiles will gain access to its Facebook Mentions application.
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Twitter’s Periscope live-video streaming app was in the news yesterday after it made a milestone of 10M signups in four months. The company has now intimated Mentions (The app where “Live” resides) will be rolled out to Verified Profiles “soon”.
This feature is not to be confused with Facebook’s original content interview series Facebook Live, which seems to be on hiatus. Unlike its rivals Meerkat and Periscope where video gets deleted instantly or is available only after 24 hours, the Facebook Live video can be permanently saved which can be watched later.
Apart from celebrities, when launched for other users as well, Live can prove to be a useful feature by giving access to creators to conduct contests, DIY project walk-throughs, talk shows, first-person adventures or even on-spot journalism, something which is already popular over Periscope. That could be because the platform needs technical work to scale to that load.
Though this still doesn’t include the average Joe, Facebook is quickly warming to more and more people accessing their Mentions platform, something it was previously a little reserved about, though no actual date has been revealed as to when Verified Profiles can use the service. But my theory is that Facebook wanted to start with celebrities to teach users what’s interesting to stream, and avoid everyone shooting off low-quality “Hello world/this is my breakfast” broadcasts that could convince people livestreams aren’t fun to watch. Periscope might have gotten a five-month head start and just hit 10 million registered users.
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