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Bonfire — The new group video chat app from Facebook 🔥
Bonfire is the long-rumored Houseparty competitor for Facebook. It's a group video chat app that lets you hang out with your best friends and meet new ones. Open the app to start video chatting instantly.
It's currently only available in the Danish App Store.
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First Twitter with Meerkat competitor Periscope, now Facebook with Houseparty competitor Bonfire. I don't think he is too thrilled ;)
@roy_hermann_ueland @rrhoover Seriously, Ben can't catch a break. Things were different with Meerkat. I hope with Houseparty, he is able to compete with Facebook.
@roy_hermann_ueland yeah, i feel bad for him but at the same time i feel really proud. shouldn't these companies (fb, twitter) hire him and his team instead? Look at those promising products theyve released recently, what more can they do with a bunch of cash in hand
@roy_hermann_ueland @ohitsmerenz if he can't make 52M work then consider it another failure. the reality is facebook will clone anything in the social space so everyone must be prepared for the inevitable
@roy_hermann_ueland @ohitsmerenz @gradx Yea it kind of a sad reality. I wonder if there is a play one could make to avoid this. Do you think Facebook considered acquihire before blatant copy?
Unearthed on the Danish App Store. Hard to download if not in Denmark... but not impossible ;)
@mattnavarra Wow. The screenshots look almost identical to houseparty. They aren't even being sly about this one.
Psst! 😉 How to download Facebook’s unreleased Bonfire video chat app today: https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017...
I always have mixed feelings about such obvious copies of competitors (e.g. Instagram Stories).
- On one side, I'm outraged that such Big Cos copy so openly smaller startups
- On a more neutral standpoint, I acknowledge the fact that they have the right to do it
- But then as a user, I might find this version even better than the original and be delighted by it
I think this has potentially big B2B implications. If they integrate video chat into their Workplace product, then we could see big impacts upon GoToMeeting, Blue Jeans, Skype, etc. All of those products have intermittent performance issues and aren't well integrated into other communication tools. Microsoft seems to aspire for Skype to be well integrated with Yammer & Sharepoint, but don't seem to have hit the mark yet.
Can we talk about how Facebook seems to have this strange vendetta against Meerkat?
My take on copying ideas from others:
Copy only if you can make it really a lot better (it's called improving). Substantially. So much so that you become that improvement.
If the copy is marginal, ordinary or simply to snatch userbase, then you deserve to be crushed and ignored.
Facebook has a lifelong story of doing the latter and then, after the obvious outcome.. buy everything that's for sale. Whatever happens, it all gets fed into Facebook core services. Garbage and diamonds.
I do not see anything different here, any improvements at all and I won't be surprised if Facebook makes an offer after failing (it's just history). If they haven't already..
Man, I feel SO bad for the Houseparty (formerly Meerkat) team. Facebook and Twitter sure love to jump right into whatever market they happen to innovate in. It's the free market, I suppose. :)
Now all I need is to find attractive, 20-something friends and I can finally have a use for apps like these!
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