What Happened To My Digital Ghosts?
Some apps die as quickly as they appear. Do we learn anything?
The Teardown
Thursday :: February 6th, 2024 :: Approx. 4 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.
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In 2020, everyone needed group conversation. Caveat: you couldn’t do it in-person.
So, you jumped on a Zoom, or on a Webex, or a Teams meeting.
But those weren’t native consumer apps like Instagram or Snap. They were drab and boring, perhaps managed by some other device protection software meant to wipe your phone or tablet if you misbehaved.
What happened? Well, many people went looking for alternatives and found one in Houseparty, an app that was already alive and well but blew up in popularity in alignment with COVID-19.
Houseparty was a great private-group video-chat app, requiring little more than the app itself and a basic account. Like Kinopio, it exposed a bold, colorful, and fun interface to users - implying a use-case tilted towards younger generations.
The app disappeared almost as quickly as most people learned about it.
Epic Games had acquired the app prior to 2020, noticing that many Fortnite players referenced Houseparty as their live-game discussion app of choice. And, in 2021, the app’s technology fully blended into Fortnite itself, leaving the Houseparty domain vacant.
In parallel, many people also discovered another buzzier app: Clubhouse.
What was Clubhouse? To this day, I can’t evangelize the story the way it was communicated during investor meetings.
In short, Clubhouse was and is a live audio chat app. We didn’t know we needed it, but somehow, we wanted it.
What Clubhouse did well was enable some sense of speaker and participant coordination. Speakers in charge of calls could mute others and nominate (digitally) eager people to contribute and ask questions. The app became, in my circles, the digital equivalent of a fireside chat at a conference - no Allbirds or vests necessary. It was cool, hip, and easy.
The company laid off 50% of its staff in 2023. It cited a number of predictably corporate things as a company does when announcing layoffs, but the catalyst seemed obvious: the app went from something you talked about and used to something you didn’t. It was that simple.
And yet, Clubhouse roams as a digital ghost as I see it. The app is a faint reminder of what it briefly once was. But it still operates and works much the same.
Not long ago, I sent a screenshot to a few friends:
That’s Clubhouse’s home screen.
The interface almost begs you to meet people but then you ask: why? Who are they? What are they talking about? Prior successful meeting spaces (if that’s what they’re called) were sometimes titled and scheduled, much like conference calls. Those aren’t on the screen.
So, why didn’t it work and what might that tell us about today?
There are lots of reasons, some good, some bad. But I think that the true catalyst was friend momentum. Clubhouse convinced lots of people to join but didn’t traverse their various friend networks well. That led to narrow usage in my circles and many others, I suspect.
In my case, Clubhouse was limited almost exclusively to people focused on insurance technology. And even that subset was filtered even more to folks that could be bothered to follow through and download the app.
Clubhouse needed networks of people to use the app with each other such that discovery and exploration elsewhere (in the app) made sense.
Instead, the opposite happened. Clubhouse rooms look randomly constructed, though I will be clear in saying that I’ve not exhaustively researched their participants.
The conversation, so far as I can tell, is something else entirely. There’s no sense (that I hear) of leaders and speakers and an enormous amount of cross-talk. That makes it hard for an old-fuddy-duddy like me to hear what they’re saying.
I was thinking about Clubhouse again reading about Apple’s new Invites app, an iOS-only app for creating and managing events. Does a party (or other event) app require you to import a friend network? No, not really.
What Invites does a bit differently is fence the better invitation experience around iOS (Apple) users. Non-Apple users see a degraded (but still fine) view through a web browser.
Nonetheless, the app still suffers from a similar problem: do I trust my friends to use it over other obvious alternatives? Eventbrite, Minted, Paperless Post, Partiful. There are more.
No, not really. They’ll ask me what my invite is vs. what they do with Minted or other similar apps: they open and accept or decline my events. They’ve seen those invites before and know what to do with them.
Of course, Apple doesn’t need Invites to succeed at all. It could be a low-use and money-losing app for years with absolutely no consequences.
So, the key question is whether Apple Invites will become, like Clubhouse, another digital ghost. Let’s wait and see.
What’s your prediction? Will Invites take off or is it a dud?