Facebook to introduce a group video chat

Taking inspiration from 'Houseparty', the group video chat app, Facebook will soon be introducing a new app which has the working name 'Bonfire'.The app was recently demonstrated for employees and is expected to come out in September.

Facebook’s move comes two years after Life On Air, which had helped usher in a new era of live broadcasting with its app Meerkat, pivoted to group video chat. The company’s founder, Ben Rubin, observed that most people never broadcasted more than a handful of times, whether on Meerkat or its eventual competitors, Facebook Live and Twitter-owned Periscope. And so Rubin and his team built Houseparty, which notifies a user’s friends whenever they have the app open, inviting them to hang out virtually on their smartphones.

Houseparty is currently a top 200 app in Apple’s US App Store, according to market research firm App Annie. It took off among teenagers and by November 2016 it had 1.2 million users spending 20 million minutes a day on it. The app employs video, the current obsession of the tech-media industrial complex.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

The growing popularity of the group video chat and the competitive threats forced Facebook to come up with a similar app. The company first tried to acquire Snapchat and once rebuffed, invested heavily in cloning its most distinctive features.The new attraction among the teenagers has given Facebook reasons to explore and come up with a similar app. Houseparty’s core function is to bring close groups of friends together. This encroaches on Facebook’s newly restated mission statement which focuses on building tight-knit communities.

Facebook’s track record with cloned products has been mixed. Slingshot and Bolt, two earlier Facebook apps designed to blunt Snapchat’s momentum, died quick deaths. And while the company appears to have struck gold with Instagram stories, its refined take on Snapchat’s ephemeral public posts, similar products in the main Facebook app and in Facebook Messenger has generated little enthusiasm among users.

Facebook may have an advantage over Houseparty in its ability to quickly connect its two billion users to their friends on the social network in order to get them to use the new app or even link to group chats straight from Messenger.
Bonfire is not the only standalone video app Facebook is pursuing. Employees were also recently shown an app called Talk. While details were scarce, one source said the app is designed to encourage younger people to communicate with their grandparents using video chat. Talk’s existence was first reported last month by The Information.

Not many details about Bonfire could be learned, however, sources claim it to be a clone of Houseparty. The launch of this app will certainly pose a significant challenge for Ben Rubin.Houseparty declined to comment about the new Facebook launch.