Facebook Launches Meme-Tastic Video App 'Riff'

Facebook on Wednesday unveiled an app called Riff that lets users create video with friends. It's kind of like Vine or Instagram, except short videos can keep growing until they reach "Godfather"-like proportions. First, a user creates a video up to 20 seconds long and then adds a hashtag to it. Then friends add their own videos to it. "The potential pool of creative collaborators can grow exponentially from there, so a short video can become an inventive project between circles of friends that you can share to Facebook, or anywhere on the internet, at any time," Josh Miller, project manager for Riff, wrote in a press release.

The idea reportedly came after the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral. Instead of friends all posting separate videos of themselves getting doused with cold water, they could have simply joined the videos together in one long super-cut. It could work for a variety of memes, like 10 minutes of collaborative footage of people "icing" each other or doing the Harlem Shake. Riff also comes with a fast-forward function so that friends can zip through older video to add their own. The app is available for iOS and Android.