Facebook Riff is a video recording app. Friends with Riff can contribute to your videos with their own. Then your friends' friends will see the video and can add their own videos. The purpose is to create collaborative viral videos.

Promising, but limited idea

It's obvious the goal of Riff is to create viral videos that are shared on Facebook and within the app. This is why Riff lets other people add videos.

Riff videos last 20 seconds. Riff will suggest hashtags and names when you give you video a title. Since you want to make a viral video, it's best to record simple ideas.

Your video is shared on your Facebook wall for friends to see. As more people add their own videos, it gets spread throughout Facebook.

The more contributors a video has, the more likely Riff will place it in the main feed so it goes viral. You can't add to the most popular videos and can only check to make sure there's no unsafe material.

Riff's concept is interesting, but its limitations are disappointing. You can only view your friends' videos or higlighted videos. There's no search function for categories. For a lot of users, you'll see the same videos over and over.

It would be nice if you could edit the privacy settings of your videos. Ideally, setting a video for just your friends could make more people comfortable sharing videos.

Simple interface

The interface of Riff is minimalist, but effective. You can record your video, play friend's videos, or watch the highlighted videos.

Video playback is smooth and will save where you stopped playing. But there isn't a way to skip around a video, you're stuck watching from start to finish.

Uploading videos to Riff can be laggy and sometimes requires a refresh to complete.

Original idea that needs improvement

Riff is still an experiment. It's concept is OK, but it needs more options and features. If it stays the way it is now, people will quickly move on and stop using it. While Riff is usable now, it's best to wait until Facebook updates the app with more options.