Meerkat built a new app under a pseudonym, and almost 1M people are using it
theverge.com
theverge.com
Oh God, I weep for the world we're making for ourselves.
Last I checked, putting down your phone and actually being present with someone is as real as it gets. But I guess it's hard to monetize, gamify, and micro-transact that.
What we'd need again is being bored.
It's easy. It's been the job of pubs, bars, restaurants, theme parks, sports events, etc. since time immemorial.
What is hard to do is to make it a high-growth business that would attract VC money. That's the source of this bullshit.
Sometimes you have to look beyond your own situation and think that you may not be the target, which means this may solve problems you don't have and be convenient for a scenario you never encounter.
No. Nobody cares that much for their friends (especially their hundreds of "friends" on social media), or has that time to spare on real-time streaming. For the times when this is actually needed, there are tons of videoconference apps.
Next question?
I wrote off Snapchat with many of the same kind of flip dismissals and I was pretty wrong about how popular it would eventually be. I'm too old for this app, or even snapchat, but think back to when you were a teen and remember what it was like to just shoot the shit with friends after class. Thats the kind of interaction they seem to be trying to facilitate.
At least email is still pretty standardised, but in some ways it feels like the Internet is breaking apart. :-/
"Because most live streams aren’t interesting enough to justify stopping what they are doing to watch your broadcast." https://medium.com/@shaanvp/blab-is-dead-long-live-blab-d2f7...
You have to pay careful attention while you're using it. It's like attending a video conference. How often and for how long do you want to do that?
I am little interested about yesterday's news or last months news.
What other websites would you suggest beside HN to read about latest startup trends?
Even when there's a million users, or crazy growth that doesn't change apparently. There's a saying somewhere now that if HN hates it its a good sign. This is probably a test of it. Snapchat & Twitter in the hall of fame.
Is it the social graph? (Friends or friends of friends)
In that case, how does this have advantage over Facebook if Facebook ever decides to build one like this?
I hope they have some other advantage that can't be easily replicated.
We all know how that turned out.
TinyChat is Flash-based. Since this is meant for SmartPhones, no flash, I'd wager.
"I hope they have some other advantage that can't be easily replicated."
They don't. Everything this thing does, Camfrog pretty much did on desktop 15-ish years ago and several years back on mobile.
All the talk of "candid conversations" sure doesn't give me the warm-and-fuzzies when I consider that the only way to monetize this is abusing user metadata or scraping the video feeds for trending topics.
- is it 1 million returning daily users, or 1 million registered users?
- percentage of their registered users in the past month that come back every day (basically, are users addicted, or not really?).
- How many times users open the app every day and average length of each video session?
I've seen the app there before and tried it out, very nice onboarding flow that seemed like it could be viral, but I don't think it maintained its app store position.
If they are closing in on 1m returning daily actives, that's pretty sweet. If it's 1 million total users who ever signed up, that's actually a bit of a concern given how many downloads they should have gotten when they were topping the app store charts.
I'm far to old to use this app with my friends but it seemed like a much more friendly version of Google Hangouts, which my sister, who is in their target demographic, uses quite often.
They are definitely onto something, just literally follow any kid around, and they all like to video chat with their friends in real-time, and they snapchat doesn't solve that specific problem for them (yet).
1) Fad Success like the one experimented by YikYak (same target demographic) and then struggling to maintain growth and traction.
2) Getting copied by Snap, Facebook, Twitter (perhaps even Google now that they have Allo) and repeating Meerkat's faith.
3) Reaching an inflection point that allows them to have growth and traction (like the one Snapchat had in its early years) and had decent exit by being acquired by any of the companies in #2.
It's hard to tell which one would be, but as I said the barriers to entry are very low. I would expect Facebook or another big company releasing something similar in the short term.