Distant Friends Missing? Throw a Spontaneous Virtual Party With This App
What if you could throw a virtual party whenever you want so your friends from all over the world can be present whenever you want? This is the idea behind Houseparty, a video chat app for iOS and Android (click links to download) designed for spontaneous conversation.
Houseparty has a huge fan following among teenagers, but I didn’t hear about it about 6 months ago.
The principle of its operation is quite simple: when you start the application, you create a kind of chat room, and then your friends, who also have the application, can enter it. Your friends can customize everything so that they receive a notification every time they start the application. (if they definitely don’t want to miss you) and you have the option to invite friends to chat who won’t get to them on their own.
Six years ago, I moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and found this app to be a great way to stay in touch with some of my best friends who aren’t around. There are endless ways to video chat these days, and we also use them, but there is something nice about being able to say “Oh, Kayla is online” and look into the chat.
With other video chat options like Skype, Facetime, and Google Hangouts, I always feel like I need to ask before calling, or make an appointment ahead of time to chat with friends. Video chat is not something I can do by accident without any scheduled chat set up before I dial the number. With Houseparty, I can drink beer at home alone, decide I need company, and immediately invite all my friends who have the app to join me.
Of course, sometimes this means that I still drink this beer alone. However, more often than not, some of my friends are also somewhere where they can video chat a bit and a virtual party ensues.
For example, one evening I finished an hour of chatting with friends in New York, Chicago, North Carolina, and Los Angeles. We were all college friends, but we hadn’t been in the same room in over ten years. Even though the hangout was happening on my tiny phone screen, it was pretty amazing when we were all in the same place at the same time and we didn’t plan it at all.
The halls can accommodate up to eight people, and you can open several rooms at the same time. The idea is that you can move between different “rooms” at the party and chat with different groups of friends.
You can block rooms if you want to have a private chat. Otherwise, they are open to anyone who is friends with someone who is already in the room. For example, if I’m talking to my friend Paul from New York, then his girlfriend Sally, whom I don’t know, can also join our room. In fact, I met several people in this way, with whom I later spoke in person.
Using the app requires your friends to have the app too. However, it’s fun enough that once you have a few friends, it spreads across your group of friends pretty quickly. When I started out, I had maybe three friends using the app, and now I’m in my thirties, which increases my chances of finding that drinking companion late at night.