There’s a Facebook event this Thursday – our own Harry McCracken will be there covering it – but TechCrunch thinks it might already know what’s going to be announced.
“On June 20, a source says Facebook will unveil that Instagram, its popular photo-sharing app, will begin to let people also take and share short videos. Call it the Vine effect,” reports Ingrid Lunden.
Vine, as you may recall, is the Twitter-owned video service that lets users capture six-second video clips for quick and easy sharing.
Adding video to Instagram seems like a relatively mundane thing to hold an entire press event about, so maybe this part of a larger announcement or maybe – *looks at calendar* – yep, we’re getting into the tried-and-true summer tech news slowdown.
Facebook may be trying to temper expectations, too: Its event invitation says, “Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.” It’s just coffee, in other words. Facebook isn’t taking us out to a fancy dinner or anything.
Mashable wonders whether the event might be used to announce a Facebook RSS reader in light of Google shutting down its own RSS reader on July 1.
I’d argue that using the Like button effectively turns Facebook into an RSS reader anyway, but with Digg building its own RSS reader and current RSS powerhouses like Feedly all looking to cash in on the vacuum created by the Google Reader shut down, it wouldn’t be totally outrageous to think Facebook might want to get in on the action as well.
Whatever the case, we’ll know more for sure on Thursday — check back here for updates.