Facebook just bought that cool 'face swap' app so it can properly take on Snapchat

Facebook has had enough of your crap, Snapchat. It sees you over there, making everybody angle their phones high above their head, rolling out new facial filters constantly so that all of your mates post videos of themselves with rainbows pouring out of their mouths. Facebook has had enough.

Yesterday, the company confirmed that it had bought out an app called MSQRD (or Masquerade if you love vowels more than Silicon Valley hates them), which does a similar thing, but swaps out your face with another person’s face instead of mutilating it horribly.

They haven’t confirmed how much they bought the app for, but there was a hoax just two weeks ago that Apple was going to buy MSQRD for around $117 million, if that helps you think of a ballpark figure.

Mark Zuckerberg even posted a video of himself welcoming the MSQRD team to Facebook using a video of himself as Iron Man. Let’s face it, if billionaire computer expert Mark Zuckerberg was going to stick any superhero onto his own digital face, it was always going to be the billionaire industrial expert of Tony Stark, wasn’t it?

You just know that everyone’s going to get tired of MSQRD pretty sharpish (if they haven’t already) but the tech has to be applauded. To construct something that changes how you look in a camera and tracks your head while you do it, in a mobile phone and not some skyscraper super-computer, is pretty impressive.

Regardless, after failing to acquire Snapchat a few years ago, Facebook is keeping a keen eye on what the photo messaging app is doing considering the massive success its had with a younger audience, something that Facebook is struggling to retain.

So prepare yourself for your Dad wishing you a happy birthday with an Iron Man helmet plastered onto his face, shouting at your Mum in faux agony that his own appearance has been massively disfigured for eternity. That might just happen.