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A few months ago, we wrote about how Fortnite was turning into the next big social network. It seems we weren’t the only ones who thought so.

Yesterday, social video app Houseparty announced that it is getting acquired behind Epic Games, aka the creator of Fortnite.

It’s a natural fit. While Fortnite continued to become socially oriented, Houseparty has recently begun to move into gaming with integrated games and screen sharing. In fact, Fortnite players are already using Houseparty as they game. 🙌

A brief history of Houseparty: If you recall, Houseparty was initially built in secret by the makers of Meerkat in 2015. In 2016, Houseparty debuted on Product Hunt. An initial message from Houseparty founder Ben Rubin:

“On the surface it’s like a super fast and simple 'group facetime' while also becoming the foundation for an elaborate virtual space where people can hang with friends when they are physically apart. Face-to-face conversations over the internet are way too formal right now. We wanted lightweight way for us to see our friends everyday, no setup required. In a funny way, this is always the experience we wanted to give our users on Meerkat.“

Some reactions from the community:

“It's great, simple and FUN! See y'all on the party line in the cloud” - Tarikh

“Been using Houseparty for the last few weeks and it's a lot of fun. Love the simplicity of opening the app and instantly being thrown into a group video chat with friends.” - Jack

“I've been a user of House Party for a few months now, and the thing that has struck me about it is how serendipitous it is. I've had catchup conversations with my friends randomly because of a push notification, and I've made a few new friends. That's powerful.” - Ben

Shortly after Houseparty's rise to 1M DAUs, Facebook quickly followed with the now dead Bonfire app. Apple’s Facetime with groups and Facebook Messenger’s video chat also definitely took inspiration from Houseparty.

Financial details on the deal weren’t disclosed, but Houseparty preemptively answered your “so what’s next” questions in a blog post. What you need to know:

• No immediate changes will be coming to Houseparty.
• Your Houseparty friendships will remain the same.
• Your Houseparty account will remain separate from your Epic Games account if you have both (and your data won’t be shared between them).

Have you joined the party yet? 👋

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Hansel.

Hansel has a big mission: to foster peace among product managers and engineers. ✌️

From Hansel's point of view, product development and user adoption are very different problems. Yet, PMs often have to work with engineers to do both. Hansel’s platform is designed to help companies solve for user drop-offs and adoption by deploying nudges at pivotal moments in the product funnel, all with no-code. 

Why this matters: With any product, the key to long-term retention depends on users extracting high value from a product's experience. And sometimes, keeping users within key funnels and flows is a long and painful process.

Enter Hansel.

How it works: By seamlessly integrating with any analytics platforms, Hansel gives product teams a no-code, decision tree framework to deploy targeted product interactions and nudges in key product funnels. You can use historical or real-time data to map user flows and deploy customized interactions or nudges along these flows to create differentiated journeys for specific users.

What the community thinks:

“I’m a strong believer in the growth and spread of no-code platforms and Hansel seems like another step in that evolution. Happy to see a solution built specifically for PMs.” - Al

“Easily one of the best no-code platforms for product managers and product marketers.” - Sravan

Some examples of Hansel’s ability to handle scale:

• A payments app with 120M monthly users and an $18B valuation
• A gaming company with 25M users and a wildly addictive cricket game
• An ecommerce brand with 10M users and a $7B valuation

What to do now: Get started with a free trial by visiting Hansel.io

Earlier this week, a certain ~trending~ celebrity surprised the crowd at Microsoft’s Xbox event to announce CD Projekt Red’s new game, Cyberpunk 2077. It was Keanu Reeves.

Reeves took to the stage (Apple Event style 🤔) after the trailer to the open-world adventure aired, in which he plays a part. How the game works: The new RPG takes place in "Night City," where players will fight through a world of corporations and street-level games. It's a loose continuation of the Cyberpunk board game and sequel Cyberpunk 2020. If you don't remember those titles, that's because they were released in the late 80s early 90s, respectively.

Still, the PH community was psyched:

“For the love of Keanu” - Baris

“KEANU REEVES!” - Amrith

“This game already looked incredible... but adding Keanu just took it to a whole new level of awesome.” - Chad

Reeves also announced that the game will come to Xbox One and Windows 10 on April 16, 2020.

That’s a long ways away, so we’ve rounded up some entertainment for you in the meantime. Here’s a few games that have launched in the past year:

🎮 Playstation Classic for retro, preloaded games

🐯 Animar for augmented reality Tamagotchi

🐴 Red Dead Redemption 2 for the closest thing to West World

🧠 HQ Words for a brain game

🧀 Cheeze Wizards for a blockchain battle royale

🙌 Jelly Mario for a trippy Mario game in your browser

And don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know when the worldwide rollout of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite happens later this year. ⚡️

Over the weekend, we saw a novel idea launch on Product Hunt — jelly-like bubble pouches that reduce single use plastic. The edible spheres, called “Oohos,” are made of plant and seaweed extract, a material that biodegrades naturally after 4-6 weeks. 🌏

Some initial (mixed) reactions:

“If all these seaweed startups are just scavenging the Ocean’s seaweed I think we are replacing one problem with something that will likely be even a bigger problem later.” - Brad

“If we ended up in a situation where we have no plastic in the sea and have to farm more seaweed to make that happen, that sounds like a win to me.” - Vineet

The team behind Ooho is Notpla, a London-based sustainable packaging startup that wants to create plastic-free solutions. For example, Oohos could replace plastic cups and bottles at sporting events, cocktail cups at festivals, or condiment pots at fast food restaurants. 

How they make money: Notpla has created a local manufacturing machine that produces Oohos on-site. The company's primary business model is to lease this machine and sell cartridges of materials to event organizers, enabling them to produce and sell fresh Oohos with drinks or sauces as needed. 🙌

We've seen a few other startups come up with *creative* packaging solutions to eliminate single-use plastics. Notably, there's Blueland for everyday cleaning products in “forever bottles.” There's also Loop for reusable containers for things like deodarant, mouthwash, shampoo, etc. To venture further down the sustainable rabbit hole, go here.

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Hotjar.

Here’s a thought: What if you could consistently make people go “WOW” whenever they visit your site?

And what if you could understand what ultimately makes them leave your site — so you can give them what they want and make them stay?

Enter: Hotjar.

Hotjar is a user behavior and feedback tool that allows site owners to see how people are actually using their site, and collect feedback to understand why they behave the way they do. 🙌

While traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics provide a bird’s eye view of website traffic, Hotjar goes beyond the numbers with visual heatmaps, session replays and on-page surveys that help answer questions other analytics tools can't. Let’s call it the qualitative side of quantitative data.

What the Product Hunt community thinks:

“I love using Hotjar and have used it in conjunction with Google Analytics for years! I am able to gain so much insight from watching the recordings of people interacting with the site. This is something I would recommend to any digital marketing professional” - Rebecca

“This is a much-needed out-of-the-box product that gives us the heatmaps we want — all for a price and ease-of-use that isn't prohibitive! I was intrigued, and literally had this product spun up in a live web application and recording data in under five minutes” - Nick

Traditional analytics tools can tell you what your users are doing (e.g., 60% quit before completing their purchase), but only website feedback tools like Hotjar can help you understand why this is happening (e.g., the slow delivery rate is making them pause). Once you know the customer experience, it’s easy to see where you can improve.

Over 30,000 companies use Hotjar, including InVision, Microsoft and Hubspot, to name a few.

We see a lot of *quirky* things launch on Product Hunt. But some of our favorites are those that you can eat (or drink).

We went down a rabbit hole and found 10 weird, wacky new foods for you to try:

💦 Liquid Death Mountain Water for water in a can

🥣 Magic Spoon for high-protein cereal (with top-notch branding)

🍔 Impossible Burger for a burger made from plants

🍅 Imperfect Produce is exactly what it sounds like: ugly vegetables

🥕 Kencko is an instant fruit and veggie drink

☕️ Dripkit is for coffee in a box

🥑 Brightland is *elegant* olive oil

🍺 IntelligentX Brewing Co. is AI-powered beer

😋 Yumble is like Blue Apron, but for kids

💪 Soylent Squared for mini-meal bars

Over the past five-ish years, we've seen a growing trend among millennials. Let's call it the rise of renting.

Instead of buying cars, Gen Y is hailing Ubers and Lyfts. Instead of buying clothes, the group is renting occasion pieces through Rent the Runway. Rather than spending thousands $$$ on couches and chairs, they're borrowing furniture on Feather to better suit a more nomadic lifestyle. And on the other side of things, Omni lets people rent anything (bikes, cameras, drills, ladders, etc.) to others.

Renting is more affordable than buying everything upfront (in the short term) and often more eco-friendly. Instead of buying cheap, disposable things that could end up in landfills, young folks are renting quality items to repurpose to others later on.

The rise of renting is further fueled by the rise of sustainability as consumers invest their dollars into companies that treat our world a little better. The sustainability market is reportedly expected to reach $150B by 2021, with 75 percent of millennials already altering their buying habits with the environment in mind.

What else can you rent, do you ask?

👀 Echo.rent lets you rent anything to other marketplace members

🎙Podcast Rental lets you rent, and share podcast studios

🚲 Spinlister lets you rent bikes anywhere in the world

👕 The Rotation is Rent the Runway for men

🚘 Getaround lets you rent cars on-demand

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Gitalytics.

Measuring software development is complicated.

There's no magic formula to ship features or secret sauce to improve quality. It's why Gitalytics has spent years testing their platform with all levels of software teams from CTOs to junior developers. 👀

To date, Gitalytics empowers over 300,000 developers to help them transform their git data into meaningful insights. How it works: A developer imports their GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab repositories for processing. Gitalytics then analyzes the history of the repos to provide visual reports of dozens of metrics.

In the end, the tool gives engineering managers more visibility and helps devs improve their workflow. Everybody wins.

How Gitalytics is different: The platform avoids stack rankings or penalizing developers with lower scores. Instead, Gitalytics is focused on delivering relevant metrics that support industry best practices and proven strategies. The platform cuts through the noise of “Lines of Code” to focus on meaningful improvements like Time to Review, PR Success Rate and Code Ownership Distribution. There are no shortcuts or secret recipes — it's simply real data with tested solutions.

Gitalytics is already working with multiple Fortune 500 companies, who use the tool to measure impact on big changes, week to week planning, budgeting and headcount allocation.

Check it out 👇

Earlier this week, Apple gave a long overdue refresh to one of its older products — the iPod Touch.

In case you need a refresh on what the iPod touch even is; it's looks like the iPhone, but it's just an iPod.

The iPod Touch update is the first from Apple in nearly four years, and the revamped version is getting the same processor as the iPhone 7 and a new 256GB storage option.

Why hasn't Apple discontinued a product like this, you may ask?

From the comments:

“For those who are asking 'but why' one answer is 'for my kids.'” - Andreas

“For all those that hate the idea of a smartphone and want to have their entire music library - that took years to import into iTunes from CDs - available to listen to anytime anywhere.” - Tyler

In March, Apple demonstrated how it's leaning into services when it took the hood off a bunch of new products, including Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, Apple Card and gaming subscription Apple Arcade.

Apple Arcade may be the real reason behind the iPod Touch upgrade, as the company is reportedly making sure it can run all of its upcoming games on the device.

It's worth noting that Apple isn’t the only big company to revive old tech. Palm reinvented the Palm Pilot in a small form factor endorsed by Steph Curry. Nintendo shrunk the Nintendo Entertainment System so you can relive life as 16-bit Link. Nokia reimagined its classic phone and yes, it includes Snake.