App getting 51 minutes a day of teen time
With over 20 million users, 60% which are under the age of 20, spending an average of 51 minutes a day, the app Houseparty is definitely getting screen time. Yet I'd never heard of it until yesterday.
I asked a parent of teenager what the biggest challenge on devices was for their family was and she mentioned the Houseparty app. Of which I had to ask more questions because I knew nothing about it. She said her daughter who is 13 could spend up to 2 hours on the app in a day on it with up to 8 other friends video chatting. The mom mentioned some of the time they just point their device at whatever they are watching on TV and the other kids might watch it.
It looks like it was just launched on the App store this year and is similar to FaceTime or Google Duo, but there's the ability to talk to up to 8 people. You can form "parties" which others can technically even sneak into, but I believe there's enough visibility that you are notified if it's someone you don't know and you can then leave the party. This opens up the opportunity for all kinds of inappropriate things to go down, even without the possibility of a "stranger" popping in. Imagine 8 teenagers with unfiltered access to video of each other from anywhere having a "houseparty". I can see really cool things you could do with this technology to connect with people that you don't get to see in person that often, but for the teens that already see each other at school and don't live far from each other, this seems like overkill and putting too much freedom in the hands of our youth.
What do you think? This just proves to me there's a lot out there I don't know a lot about and having really little kids I need to keep asking questions.
I asked a parent of teenager what the biggest challenge on devices was for their family was and she mentioned the Houseparty app. Of which I had to ask more questions because I knew nothing about it. She said her daughter who is 13 could spend up to 2 hours on the app in a day on it with up to 8 other friends video chatting. The mom mentioned some of the time they just point their device at whatever they are watching on TV and the other kids might watch it.
It looks like it was just launched on the App store this year and is similar to FaceTime or Google Duo, but there's the ability to talk to up to 8 people. You can form "parties" which others can technically even sneak into, but I believe there's enough visibility that you are notified if it's someone you don't know and you can then leave the party. This opens up the opportunity for all kinds of inappropriate things to go down, even without the possibility of a "stranger" popping in. Imagine 8 teenagers with unfiltered access to video of each other from anywhere having a "houseparty". I can see really cool things you could do with this technology to connect with people that you don't get to see in person that often, but for the teens that already see each other at school and don't live far from each other, this seems like overkill and putting too much freedom in the hands of our youth.
What do you think? This just proves to me there's a lot out there I don't know a lot about and having really little kids I need to keep asking questions.