The interesting thing with Houseparty is that if one of your friends is already in a house party, you can join in, even if you weren’t invited. If no one’s online, you can send them a notification to get the party started. Whenever one of your friends opens the app, they enter the house, and you can immediately start chatting with them. As soon as you connect these services, you can immediately start inviting people to group video chats, meaning you don’t have to ask for their username and manually type it in. This enables you to see which of your friends are already on Houseparty. When you first sign up, you’re prompted to give Houseparty access to your contacts, Facebook and Snapchat. In that respect, it does a pretty great job. Unlike Zoom, however, it’s specifically made for socialising and chatting.īilled as a face-to-face social network, it’s a video meeting platform that lets you chat with up to eight of your friends at a time. Houseparty is all the rage right now among the teens as they seek connection in these socially distant times. It’s the social video meeting app for Zoomers Another thing is that with the Hangouts Chat app, the organiser needs a Google account to set up the meeting, and not everyone may be comfortable using Google for a number of reasons. It all just feels a lot more modern than its main competitors.Īgain, like Zoom, it isn’t the best for one-to-one calls because it requires you to send over an invitation or a link, and you can’t just call up a friend impromptu. While Zoom has its virtual backgrounds, Hangouts has emojis, stickers and GIFs. What we love about it, though, is that it’s a hell of a lot more fun than Zoom. The free version is a bit more restrictive, with a maximum hangout size of 25 people, so if you’re looking to have an all-night virtual party with everyone you know, Hangouts Chat might not be for you. The apps are also far easier to use on mobile and tablet than Zoom thanks to a clean interface. Google’s made advanced features like increased meeting sizes and meeting recordings free until the end of June to help those during the Covid-19 crisis. It allows you to connect with up to 250 people at a time with the advanced subscription, and a real perk of that is that it connects seamlessly with G-Suite, so any calendar invites will be sent straight to your inbox with a link to join the meeting. Hangouts Meet requires a G-Suite subscription to use. The nomenclature may be confusing, but it's a good idea nonetheless. Having the two platforms means that Google has struck a nice balance between catering to the crowd who want to hang out with their virtual mates and the business users looking to hold (actually important) meetings. Try fiddling around with that if your parents aren’t so technically inclined. You either have to give somebody your 10-digit personal meeting ID or send over a Zoom link. One-to-one calls are unlimited, but if you just want to call up your friend, WhatsApp or FaceTime (see below) is probably the better option as the interface isn’t exactly built for quick calls and isn’t the simplest thing to navigate. That said, it’s not the best service if you’re trying to stay connected to your pals, though. Paid subscription options give you access to over 100 participants and unlimited meeting lengths. However, with the free version meetings with more than three people cut out after 40 minutes – not ideal for most businesses. The free version has pretty much everything you need – screen sharing, recorded meetings and even breakout rooms. There are also a number of pricing tiers that you can subscribe to depending on the size of your organisation. Right now, Zoom has been having a big influx of users and the web version has been crashing and disconnecting for some of us at WIRED, so that might be something to keep in mind. Launching a meeting is also a doddle – with just a click of a button, you can either generate a link to send to your friends or type in an email address to send the link directly to someone's inbox. You can use Zoom from the iOS and Android app or from your desktop or browser, though it’s worth mentioning that Zoom is definitely more computer friendly than it is phone friendly. You have the ability to share your screen, message the group and even send across files and photos from your cloud service of choice.
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