Deekay is in the House

… or why I think Houseparty is possibly the most disruptive communication product we’ve seen since Snapchat.

I’ll admit it: I’m an unabashed believer in Houseparty.

I’ve worked on many new communication tools and new behaviors over the years, grown various services from scratch to provide utility to millions of people (hi, blip.me!), but not since Snapchat have I seen something that I believe has this potential for huge staying power.

But first, let’s look at the disbelievers: most of the skepticism I’ve heard around Houseparty tends to focus on the fact that there are many video chat services already available. “Facebook Messenger has video chat! Whatsapp has video chat! Even Skype has video chat! Why is this different?”

Now, what do I like? I think that the core of Houseparty is that it functions as a new type of broadcast status: “I’m bored, chat with me now!”. Today the modality that Houseparty provides happens to be video chat, but the “available to chat” status is useful in many forms of communication: “text with me”, “call me on the phone”, “send me a picture of what you’re doing right now”, etc. The focus that Ben Rubin and team have put into this is the right call at this stage, but it looks to me to be just the beginning of a new tool to broadcast status emerging in the world. This is exciting!

Early Twitter had aspects of this form of broadcast, but quickly grew out of this use case as the structure of asymmetric relationships doesn’t focus this use case well. This sometimes happens in pockets on Facebook. And Snapchat definitely serves some of this use case, but the live nature of Houseparty makes it extremely focused on serving this usecase. It’s “now” in a way that even Snapchat is not.

Bored hmu! @deekay