Houseparty is changing the way millions of teens talk to each other

The social interaction is
missing from most social media.

Flickr /
RansomTech

• Teens are abandoning Facebook in dramatic
  numbers.
• Where are they going? Millions of people under the age
  of 24 are gathering on Houseparty, a group video-chat
  app.
• Teens are embracing Houseparty because they say it’s
  the next best thing to hanging out with friends in
  person.

For the first time in its history, Facebook didn’t add any

daily active users in North America in the past
quarter.

It’s not totally surprising.

Facebook has been hampered by scandal after scandal, at the
same time teens are abandoning the social network in dramatic
numbers, studies

show. Finally, Facebook looks like it’s stalling out.

But if
Generation Z kills Facebook, where will the young people
go?

Twenty million people are gathering on Houseparty, a group video-chat app
most easily described as FaceTime but with more people.

It’s a social media platform that feels a lot like the
past. When you open the app, it asks you to signal that
you’d like to chat, then notifies your friends that you’re “in
the house.” If your friends are already online, you can start a
video chat or join an existing room with a single tap. Users can
hang with up to eight friends at once.

Read more: Here’s
how to use Houseparty, the live video app that teens are going
crazy for

More than half of Houseparty users are under the age of 24, which
puts it squarely in favor with America’s youngest generation.

And they are obsessed. Houseparty users spend an
average of 51 minutes a day on the app, which puts their
engagement ahead of Facebook’s 50 minutes (Messenger and
Instagram included) and Snaphat’s 30 minutes. This metric would
make any app developer jealous, and it happened for the people
behind Houseparty simply because they made the social network
that they always wanted.

Houseparty lets users chat with up to eight friends at
once.
Houseparty

The gool ol’ days of AIM

Sima Sistani remembers the days of returning from class and
signing onto AOL Instant Messenger in her college dorm. She and
her friends recapped their first (and many bad) dates while
“studying” on the app. It looked
something 
~*LiKe ThIs*~.

Though the personal computer gave her a screen to hide
behind, Sistani — who is cofounder of Life On Air, the company
that built Houseparty — still more or less talked to her friends
on AOL Instant Messenger. There was emotion pouring through her
fingertips.

Plenty of social media apps today ask teens to interact
with their friends by thumbing through an endless feed of photos,
text, and video, and tapping to like or comment. They have more
connections on social media than ever, yet many of those
friendships are thin, leaving people wanting more meaningful
connections in life.

“Social media started as this promise to connect people,”
said Sistani, who studied sociology. She added, “I don’t think
the social media that’s out there today is delivering on that
promise.”

Meerkat’s second act

Houseparty isn’t the company’s first crack at creating a
better social media platform. 
In 2015, Life On
Air launched a live-streaming app called Meerkat that let people
broadcast from their mobile phones to friends and interested
strangers. It spawned everywhere overnight.

But Meerkat failed spectacularly, raising $12 million in
new funding before fizzling out amid competition from Facebook
and Twitter.

Sima Sistani and Ben Rubin are cofounders of
Houseparty.
Houseparty

According to Sistani, the Meerkat team set out to connect
people in the most human way possible when physically apart. But
their method for doing so came to alienate their target users:
people like them.

“We have these devices that are in our pockets, they allow
us to bring people into our point-of-view, and that’s going to
connect everybody,” Sistani said. “But it didn’t. What it did was
create a stage. A stage is inherently a performance, and the
people who are best at performing are influencers and media
creators; not me, not you. That’s when we took a step back and
thought, ‘OK, it’s not meant to be a stage. It’s not meant to be
a performance. It’s supposed to feel like a house party.'”

Sistani and her team took inventory of what they loved
about Meerkat and tried again, hacking together the Houseparty
prototype in 10 months.

What’s its secret?

All conversations on Houseparty, which launched in 2016, happen
in real time. They’re between friends and sometimes friends of
friends, when a user invites their buddy to join a group
video-chat.

The app is scrubbed clean of “like” buttons, comments, news
feeds, and follower counts. You won’t find filters or animations
to spice up what users see. Everything about the product
communicates that “this is a place for the people you care about
most,” Sistani said.

In a survey of 1,000 social media users, Houseparty had
the highest percentage of people saying they felt happy after
spending time on the app.
Houseparty

In fact, people on Houseparty have a median number of 23 friends.
By comparison, a survey of 1,000 social media users found that
people on Facebook report having 269 friends, while Instagram
‘grammers have a median 348 followers, according to Houseparty
and trend forecasting and consumer research firm Trendera.

About 70% of survey participants said their friends on Houseparty
are “real friends,” compared to just 35% on Instagram. As such,
they have a better time hanging out on Houseparty.

The survey asked participants if they felt happy after scrolling
through Facebook or Instagram, watching their friend’s stories on
Snapchat, and video chatting on Houseparty. Houseparty had the
highest percentage of people saying they felt happy after
spending time on the app, though it was topped by the 84% of
participants who said they felt happy after hanging out with
friends in person.

“I think on a lot of these platforms, what ends up happening is
we quote-unquote friended all these people, and it turned into a
popularity contest,” Sistani said. “That has consequences for
what you end up putting out there, how it represents you.”

She added, “For Houseparty, my hope is that we can bring people
back to face-to-face, back to real-time connection and
communication. And part of that is making sure that the next
generation — my kids in particular — know the right reaction to
excitement, not just the right emoji for it. What we’re really
trying to do here is bring the humanity, the soul, back to social
media.”