Quarantined parents crash Houseparty

Long used by teenagers, the video-chat app is now being discovered by ageing newcomers.

A woman lifts her glass and cheers with friends during a virtual happy hour amid the coronavirus crisis. Picture: AFP

While housebound by the pandemic, Alexis “Lexi” Serino inspired her mother and aunt to download Houseparty, a video-chat app that the college senior sometimes uses to socialise with friends.

Ms Serino, 21 years old, has been waiting out the coronavirus back home in Medford, Massachusetts, with her family, and her Houseparty newbies have struggled to fit in.

‘Sorry, I was on mute.’

“They don’t know how to mute themselves or flip the camera,” said Ms Serino. She saw her mother put a phone to her ear to make a video call on the app. Her aunt aimed the camera at the ceiling during a Houseparty chat with relatives. “My cousin is like, ‘There’s Lexi, Joe and Maria’s ceiling,’ ” she said.

Long populated by teenagers and 20-somethings, Houseparty is being invaded by ageing newcomers stuck home with a younger generation. The older users alternately entertain and annoy everybody with their new video-chat habit.

Lily Jens’s parents started hosting friends for a Houseparty Happy Hour from their home in Randolph, New Jersey. “It’s weird seeing them do it,” the 13-year-old said. Worse, her parents ask her to make on-camera appearances.

“They’re nice people, but I don’t know exactly what to do,” said Lily. “I say ‘Hi,’ and stand there awkwardly.”

Children notice their parents blabbing over their screens on Houseparty for hours — the same moms and dads who before the coronavirus crisis would nag the kids about spending too much time on their smartphones.

Fady Elmairy of Cairo isn’t amused by his mother’s new social-media practice. Nevine Elias, 40, stuck home by the pandemic from her job at a petroleum company, talks a few times a day with friends over Houseparty.

“She chats so much it was giving us a headache,” said Fady, 15. “She never used to do videoconferencing. Now, she does it even more than I do.”

Ms Elias doesn’t deny it. Houseparty, she said, “helps us communicate while we are all sitting at home.”

Houseparty launched in 2016 and shot to the top of the download charts. Young people gathered via phone screens or computers as if huddled in a dorm room. Growth started to stall last year, but pandemic shut-ins created a wave of new video-chat fans, including older people joining Houseparty.

Unlike Zoom or Google Hangouts, video-chat programs popular with schools and businesses, Houseparty not only offers to connect to users’ phone lists but also to their social-media contacts so they can become “friends” over the app. Once you open a chat and are in “the house,” any of your Houseparty friends can join — up to eight at once.

Houseparty is being used to host cocktail parties remotely.

The app also automatically lists the usernames of strangers when typing a letter or character into the search bar, making it possible to send “friend” requests to anyone. Alex Ahom, 39, downloaded Houseparty and began accepting these requests from people he assumed he knew. He was surprised by how quickly he went from making connections to joining live video chats.

“Literally within minutes, someone is calling,” said the father of three in Hamburg, Germany. “This guy was like, ‘How is your day going,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Where do I know him from? Do I know him at all?’ ”

In March, Houseparty gained 17 million downloads worldwide, according to Sensor Tower Inc. Houseparty also was among the top 10 downloaded apps in 17 countries last month, including Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain, the firm said.

Andrew Gibbins, a 47-year-old architect in Ware, England, recently discovered he could pop into his teenage son Louis’s Houseparty conversations without an invitation. “I think he was slightly embarrassed because there were a couple of young ladies on the call,” said Mr. Gibbins.

He asked who was his son’s girlfriend. “It was quite funny,” he said.

The younger Mr Gibbins, 19, could tell his friends were confused by the intrusion. “They were like, who’s this man who just joined us?”

It is possible to ward off unwanted visitors with the lock button at the bottom of the screen. But using that and other features of Houseparty — such as the ability to “ghost” or hide from a connection — can perplex older newcomers.

Mr Gibbins blames himself for helping his father create a Houseparty account to virtually celebrate a younger co-worker’s birthday. “My dad’s trying to get in on the youthful trends,” the teen said. “He’s trying to look cool.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Houseparty was being abandoned by young users migrating to other social apps such as TikTok. Now, it is luring back early users as well as attracting first-timers.

Some new users are old enough to compare how people’s faces stack in boxes on-screen to the classic TV sitcom “The Brady Bunch,” which made its debut a half-century ago. They aren’t shy about crashing the Houseparty.

Donna Serino, a 54-year-old accountant whose daughter Lexi caught her early mistakes, said, “I’m a little hipper than I was in the beginning.”

The Wall Street Journal