Facebook launched a new video collaboration service named Riff earlier this week.

Riff allows friends on Facebook to make short videos together, similar to Snapchat's Our Stories or apps like JumpCam and MixBit. Users can add short videos for up to 20 seconds, send it out to friends and have them add to the video in a unique way.

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Once the first video is done, it will be sent to all friends on Riff. Facebook sends a notification alongside uploading it onto a video news feed for other friends to collaborate.

The video title tends to be the key for what it's all about but friends are able to add whatever they want to extend the video.

"The potential pool of creative collaborators can grow exponentially from there, so a short video can become an inventive project between circles of friends you can share to Facebook or anywhere on the Internet," says Facebook product manager Josh Miller.

Facebook Creative Labs worked on the video app for the past few months, fine tuning the experience for iOS and Android. It's not the first time 'Creative Labs' has come up with a very similar app to Snapchat.

Facebook Poke was the last app to be labeled a Snapchat clone, but Facebook Riff takes from quite a few well known video collaboration tools.

"The core mechanic ... it has an uncanny similarity to JumpCam," says JumpCam CEO David Stewart.

Riff does allow friends to find people on Facebook instead of getting them to sign-up to JumpCam or MixBit. Hopefully, this means no more links to incomplete videos, but instead a vibrant nest of videos all shared without opening another app.

The concept for Facebook Riff came from the ice bucket challenge posted across Facebook. The social network wants to make a system where there's one collaborative viral video that continuously grows with more people tagging onto the original instead of hundreds of singular videos.

If Riff can take-off, Facebook could have another reason for users to start using video. It's been promoting videos on the news feed by autoplaying the videos, which increased video retention rates by over 70 percent.

TagsFacebook Rift, snapchat