Facebook Moments is getting a whole lot better today thanks to its first major update since the app launched two months ago. You can now create mini music videos of your pictures from your phone.
Moments are any group of photos that you have synced or shared with your friends. The concept of Moments is to help find those photos of you that your friends never sent you. It works both ways as we are likely to have forgotten to do the same. The app auto-tags all your photos and groups them together in “moments” so you can easily share them with your Facebook friends.
With today’s update, the app will now automatically create a music video for each Moment as long as its has at least six photos. You can also customize each video by changing the order of the pictures and the style of music from about a dozen options. After you’re happy with everything, you can share the video directly to Facebook, and the original friends that you shared the Moment with will also be tagged.
This sounds very similar to the Movies feature in Google Photos, except Moments is more limited, or if you prefer, focused.
With Moments, you must share photos with your friends (create a Moment) in order to see these videos. Google Photos lets you create a movie from any photos, shared or not.
Moments only works with pictures, but Google Photos will make a movie out of both pictures and video.
Lastly, you can only share Moments videos in Facebook. You can’t save a copy of it or upload it to another service like YouTube. By contrast, Google Photos allows you to save a local file so that you can share it on any other service.
Facebook is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the streaming video category. YouTube is by far the largest and most popular service, but Facebook now has 4 billion daily views and rising. The company is already testing Live, which is similar to Periscope and Meerkat, in enabling users to share live video streams. Moments videos is an obvious move to strengthen Facebook’s growth in this space.
The update is already available in the App Store, but Google Play is another story. The Google Play app was updated today as well, and the wording in the changelog is very close to the App Store listing. However, there’s no mention of the “movies” feature. We thought it was a mistake, so we tested the app, only to find that it’s not there. We can only assume the Android app will get the movies feature soon, but there is no official word.
