TrendsWelcome to Monkey, The Social Video Network (No Adults Allowed)

dotmug7 years ago9 min

Advertisement

So yes: Monkey has made its (glorious) debut on the Italian App Store. It’s about time, at least as far as teenagers are concerned, seeing how in the few weeks since Monkey’s release, not only has it cracked the top 25 of most downloaded apps, but it’s also registered 200,000 new users. It’s no surprise when you consider that one of the two founders, the 17-year-old Australian Ben Pasternak, created the Game App Impossible Rush at only 16, which has a million downloads. The other founder, the 18-year-old American Isaiah Turner, hasn’t launched any million-user projects (yet), but he’s sure not lacking in ambition: “We’re shooting to become the number 1 app in the world.”

The story of a chat app, born in a chat

The two founders met online. Obviously. But they didn’t just meet through any old chat. It was in the nerdiest forum in the network where Ben Pasternak had been hanging out for a while, looking for a partner at the same level that he could share his idea for a project with. He found Isaiah Turner and they clicked instantly. Now, besides sharing an apartment in New York, the two have set up a company that is a lot like Facebook in terms of the speed and and extent of its growth. Could it be time for Mark Zuckerberg to step down as social media king?
On the other hand, as the two millenials explained to Mashable, “One of the big problems is that all the apps out right now are built by a bunch of adults. We are both the creators of the project and the end user… I feel like it’s an underground world to adults.”

So how does Monkey work?

Monkey is a video chat app based on a simple idea: it connects strangers in the network on a completely random basis. The information about the participants is extremely limited, and so is the time they have to decide if they want to take part in the chat: 10 seconds. If, when the 10 seconds are up, the two people decide not to add more time to extend the conversation, it’s dropped.

It’s an instant and controversial mechanism, and it’s gotten no shortage of criticism, especially for people who see Monkey as the next generation of Chatroulette – the video chat app launched in 2009 that ended up in the eye of the storm after becoming a vehicle for sexually explicit content. Monkey “is an extremely clean community”, Pasternak stresses. And he and his partner created an integrated Snapchat account for Monkey for users to report problems and flag issues.

According to The New Yorker, so far the app has totaled over half a million random chats among its users. The average age of its users is 17, even if, as they point out to Mashable, it’s easy to lie about your age when you register.

Make way for the kids

When you think about it, Facebook is already almost 13 years old, and Snapchat is headed by a team of 30-somethings. So what are millenials doing? They’re inventing things like this “social video network” that offers its users a fast and intuitive tool to escape the dynamics of real world relationships, where “you’re going to have rumours and drama… but with internet friends, you can be whoever you want to be.” Keep an eye on millenials – it’s their time now.

dotmug

"C’è una sola cosa orribile al mondo, un solo peccato imperdonabile: la noia". Oscar Wilde. Dalla redazione di Dotmug non ci annoiamo di certo. Sempre alla ricerca di notizie, condiviamo, twittiamo, instagrammiamo in costante connessione con il mondo digital.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.