Hello everyone! It’s been a while :)..
18 months ago, we introduced Meerkat. Six months later, we made the decision to change direction and focus on making live video a daily habit. We weren't seeing the engagement that we hoped to get over time and thought that maybe the format of broadcast (one-to-many) is too far away from the everyday user.
Today we’re happy to introduce our latest experiment. Houseparty is a synchronous social network and it just finished going through a successful beta period of six months.
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.
I’ll be around to answer questions, ask me anything!
In an effort to give some insight into our process and our development, I wanted to include some of the guiding principles we’ve used to develop Houseparty.
Houseparty Manifesto:
* Rule #1: it’s a party
* Open up the app, and you’re with your friends — immediately
* You may have expectations of who you’ll see at the party — you may also be surprised
* The more people you know at the party, the more fun it is!
* No randos
* A house party is comfortable and casual
* You can show up — or leave — at any time
Product decisions:
* Users are always live (screen is live on open)
* Permissive; Friends can join friends-of-friends conversations
* Users know when friends are in the app
* We clear/update notification to always reflect who is currently in the house
@benrbn Congrats Ben!!! The app looks really really sweet. I can totally see this working well within a number of circles and groups that I see. i remember the days of oovoo. i think this has a lot more potential
@benrbn I had to listen to your vision for Meerkat very closely and quite often back in the day... (because I needed to know how to communicate it on the blog)
When explaining Meerkat you described the benefits of "Tweeting live video", but when explaining the vision, you mentioned things like:
• "Always live"
• "Spontaneous togetherness"
• "Everyone has a story to tell" (everyone should go live)
• Drop what you're doing when you get a notification
When you were toying with the idea for HouseParty, it was quite clear from the beginning that it reflected the original vision better than "Tweet live video" has. :)
@jtriest Hmmm... So Meerkat pivots into a new app called Houseparty that's the exact same as a old unrelated (I think) app named Teleparty which was formerly called Houseparty. Seems kinda suspicious...
@jsneedles@benrbn Any comments from you two about it?
What a party this has been.
It's definitely been hard keeping my mouth shut for the past year... But it's awesome. Everything @benrbn said times 💯! This time has been some of the most rewarding, educational and stressful I expect to see for a while. Trust me when I say our analytics are pretttttttty sweet 😎🤓
@benrbn Love the serendipity of the product. Who did you target for the beta community? What was their feedback? I've seen many high schoolers use facetime before & after class.
@nikitabier thank u Nikita! We do have many colleges and high schoolers in our community. One thing that surprised us all is how they actually use the product less when there's no-school and how the usages surges as the school year starts again.
@benrbn@nikitabier That's interesting insight. It makes sense too in a way because social platforms like Houseparty actually thrives when other traditional social interactions are taking place. There's no better place for that than at school. The piggyback effect is tremendous. Positive feedback loop.
💕, @benrbn. There have been a few articles about the app, notably @kurtwagner8's piece in Recode. Why keep it a secret for so many months? Looking back at Meerkat, would you have approached its launch differently?
@rrhoover there's something about "owning" the product that makes it a statement. We didn't feel it was ready, and the reason people wrote about it was mostly because it blew out of our hands on May hehe. But still we weren't ready to say, "this is ready" -frankly, I still believe the experience need way more work, but core foundations are here...
Congrats Ben! I recently began using Houseparty with my friends (we love it).
Where would this app stand if Apple introduced group Facetimes, and any reason to think they won't?
@aghoshal thanks!! well the product was having bit of tech issues over June. We fixed a lot of this, made the UX better and added features to lock a room, finding your friends and managing notifications!
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