Facebook presents Avatars, its competitor Bitmoji – TechCrunch

Ditch the generics emoji. The new Facebook Avatars feature lets you customize your virtual look-alike to use as a sticker in chat and comments. Once you customize the face, hair, and clothing of your Avatar, they appear in a series of frequently updated stickers that convey common expressions and emotions. From tastes to reactions to avatars, you can see this as the natural progression of self-expression on Facebook … or ruthless clone of the very popular Bitmoji selfie stickers from Snapchat.

Facebook avatars are being launched today in Australia for use in Messenger and News Feed comments before coming to the rest of the world in late 2019 or early 2020. This feature would allow Facebook to feel more comfortable. fun, younger and more communicative with the social network of one year seems more and more dull and not cool. The avatars are not as cute and as trendy as the Bitmoji in modern slang. But they could still become a popular way to add a touch of sparkle to responses without the use of cookie-style emoticons or GIF clichés.

"We've done tons of product and design work to find out, with how many people on Facebook, how to make it as representative as possible," says Jimmy Raimo, Facebook avatar communication manager. . Whether to offer religious clothing, such as hijab, a rainbow of skin colors and hair styles, Facebook did not want to leave a demographic. "They are a little more realistic, so they can be your personal avatar rather than trying to make them cute, fun and fun," says Raimo.

How to make an avatar on Facebook

Users will start to see a smiley button in the newsfeed commentary composer and the messenger sticker selector that they will be able to use to create their Facebook avatar. For the moment, only Australians can create avatars, but everyone will be able to see them on Facebook.

The creative process begins with neutral, non-sexist virgin people who can personalize from 18 traits. For now, it's not possible to start with a profile picture or a selfie and Facebook automatically generates an avatar. Facebook is looking for this technique, but Raimo acknowledges that "we want to make sure we do not show you something totally opposed to photography. There is a sensitivity around facial recognition. "

Facebook will not monetize the Avatars directly, at least initially. There is no clothing option sponsored by a fashion brand or a way to buy costume jewelery or other accessories for your mini-me. Raimo said Facebook was open to these ideas, though. "It would help personalize it for sure and from a business point of view it would be smart." It is easy to imagine that Nike or The North Face are paying to allow Avatar to display their logos, or fans who spit money to wear their favorite tags. This may be a case of using micro-payment for Facebook's next cryptocurrency.

Facebook is also planning to extend the Avatars to use them as profile or group photos – two areas of the app where you interact with strangers and enjoy the anonymity of one. 2D drawing instead of a picture of your face. However, Facebook has not really considered turning Avatars into a platform so you can use them in other applications via an API or keyboard that you install on your phone.

Instead, step 1 was simply to make sure that the Avatar creation process is easy and that most people can create one that really resembles them. The news team that created Avatars plans to conduct surveys and focus groups to help it get around. Asked about the possibility of changing the perceived age of Avatars to include older Facebook users, Raimo admitted that there is still a gap in the product she plans to fill by the end of the year. 39; year. At the moment, there is no way to add wrinkles so that mom's and dad's avatars look a little too much like yours.

The main problem of Facebook's avatars is that they are desperately behind the market. TechCrunch announced that Facebook was working on Avatars a year ago. It was already a year after writing that "Facebook was in serious need of its own Bitmoji". It's nice that it took a while to figure out how to make them inclusive, but Snapchat has won a ton of land in the meantime. Other competitors have made their appearance, such as FaceMoji's hyper-realistic animated masks, charismatic geniuses and Morphin, which plunge you deep into popular GIFs.

Bitmoji exists since 2014 and since the acquisition of Snapchat in 2016, it is one of the pillars of the top 10 applications. Sensor Tower estimates that Bitmoji has been downloaded over 330 million times. And Bitmoji now has its own development kit that generates successful applications such as YOLO, games where your character looks like you, and even faces of merchandise and smartwatch. Like Snapchat Stories, Bitmoji may be too rooted in popular culture for Facebook's avatars to escape rap as a scam.

"We are by no means the first here," says Amit Fulay, product manager for Facebook News Feed. Yet, that does not mean there are not huge possibilities here. The notion of digital representation has existed for a very long time. This is what we are trying to do on a large scale. As his speech on the copy of Snapchat Stories said, Raimo says that Facebook is more concerned with creating what most people will use and appreciate than getting credit for inventing something.

The need for human beings to represent themselves explicitly on the Internet is only growing as we move from textual communication to image communication. There are still billions of Facebook users without Bitmoji. Whether for privacy, creativity, or convenience, there is a wide variety of use cases that provide parallel virtual resemblance. This could protect our true face from unnecessary exposure to the most difficult sides of the web. And now, Mark Zuckerberg has the basics of a digital identity layer that could accompany our data, customizing every online interaction.