By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 12th, 2024
Social media giant Facebook is launching a new app dubbed Venue to serve as a second screen companion for live event commentary. The app will be tested with NASCAR’S Annual Food City Race on Sunday.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) is set to give the social media world a new option to Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) live commentary feature with the launch of Venue. It will serve as a new live commentary app to cover real-time events. The announcement is made at a time when the United State’s President Donald Trump is waging war against mainstream social media.
The announcement of Venue gave no advantage to Facebook (FB) stock which plummeted by about 0.38% on Friday. At the moment of writing, FB stock is trading at $224.60.
Venue comes off as the third app launched by the Facebook Research and Development team in the culture of rolling out impressive user-engaging features.
Features of Facebook Venue
The app developed by the NPE Team will serve as a real-time companion for live events. While the app will offer a great user interface, it will restrict commentaries for live events to renowned commentators, journalists, and pundits who will make room for the general audience to participate in polls and make specific comments.
The Venue innovation is not built primarily as a fan commentary tool. This feature dis-aligns with Twitter screen sharing option for live events which gives every user an unrestricted room to comment on live events. With Venue, users do not need to stay glued to their phones as notifications are sent when a new “moment” is available on the app.
Inaugural Test with NASCAR Race
The launching of Venue will be tested with NASCAR’S Food City 500 race on Sunday, the 31st of May, 2020. The NASCAR race is an annual cup series organized by Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol City, Tennessee. The race covers a 500-lap which runs approximately 266.5 mi (428.890 km). The race has become a very popular annual event in the entertainment industry and sets a good foundation for FB Venue to be explored. The race will be hosted in-app by popular social media personality nascarcasm.
Facebook Role in Emerging Social Media Innovations
Facebook has a large number of audiences visiting its websites and its social media channels including Instagram and Whatsapp. With over 2.6 Billion users credited to FB, the organization is tasked with the responsibility of introducing new products/channels to keep their wide audience intrigued. It will be easy to lose relevance to competitors like Twitter in the social media world if it does not keep updating new trends worth following.