Facebook starts testing MSQRD selfie filters in Canada and Brazil, opening to your camera instead of a status update prompt on top of your feed
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook bought MSQRD earlier in 2016 and previewed its roadmap at VidCon, where it promised face filters inside Live broadcasts. This Canada-and-Brazil test goes further: the selfie camera replaces the status-update prompt at the top of the feed, making capture the default action rather than text.
The move extends a pattern that began with the Snapchat-style photo uploader with swipeable filters tested on iOS in 2015, and it foreshadows the wider camera-effects and ephemeral-sharing test Facebook ran in Ireland that October. The endgame is visible in hindsight: by 2020 Facebook had folded the tech into its own apps and shut the standalone MSQRD app down.
First-order effects
- Users in Canada and Brazil now land on the camera when they open the composer, shifting daily behavior from posting text updates toward filtered photo and video sharing.
- MSQRD's filters stop being a separate app experience and become a native feature of Facebook's main feed for the first time.
Second-order effects
- Snapchat faces imitation of its core camera-first interaction in two large international markets, pressuring it to differentiate on features rather than format.
- The test gives Facebook usage data from two markets before deciding whether to roll the camera-first composer out globally, as it did with the subsequent Ireland experiment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's playbook for competing features becomes acquire-an-app, integrate-the-tech, kill-the-standalone — exactly what happened to MSQRD by 2020 — consolidating social sharing around one super-app rather than single-purpose rivals.
The trend: Facebook is absorbing standalone camera and AR apps into its main feed to neutralize Snapchat's format advantage market by market.