Whether you’re working from home, or staying in with the kids following the latest COVID-19 lockdown, staying indoors for 24 hours at home, let alone a number of days, can be extremely boring and mind-boggling. With all bars closed and unnecessary social gatherings banned, people will not be physically meeting up with their friends and family members for a number of days. Thankfully, technology experts are coming up with innovative ways to help people keep in touch with their loved ones while being entertained. Besides the usual phone calls, video chat, FaceTime and Skype are just some of the video calling platforms that can give you and your multiple friends some much needed face-to-face contact. Video chatting services, in general, have become increasingly popular over the past few weeks, both for professional use and for entertainment purposes. The most popular services include the likes of Zoom where a good number of people can throw the popular “Zoom parties” to beat the isolation blues. The video conferencing software, previously the preserve of boardroom meetings, has become the hottest virtual destination for canceled house parties, yoga classes and happy hours, where colleagues swap the pub for their laptop and a glass of wine. However, Houseparty, a social networking service that enables group video chatting through mobile and desktop apps, differentiates itself from the other services with its games and quizzes. There are plenty of things that you can do with the Houseparty app that make it arguably more interesting than traditional video-chatting apps. With the app, users receive a notification when friends are online and available to group video chat and your friends will be notified when you’re online too. One of the best things about the service is that it is easy to use, as you can easily enter a chat without having to initiate a call. Other than that, the app has other interesting features too, you can send “facemails,” which are video messages that will play when your friends open the app, and you can screen share too. Also, it’s relatively easy to get friends on Houseparty since it pulls contacts from social media apps like Facebook and Snapchat to tell you which of your friends are already using the service and to allow you to invite others. One other method to make self-isolation less lonely is Netflix’s useful add-on Netflix Party, a streaming platform and virtual chatroom that lets users engage with friends, no matter where in the world they might be, to watch movies and television shows simultaneously. Netflix Party synchronizes video playback and pausing, and adds group chat to your favorite Netflix shows. You can even dissect all the good, funny and sad bits together in real-time through a side-bar on the screen that allows for group chat. Social media connection Every now and then, the internet sees a new viral trend come to life that brings people together to partake in the “joyful challenges”. A user will come up with an innovative post of a photo, quote or song and challenge their friends to do the same. The latest challenges are the ‘Something New’ and ‘Woah’ tik tok dance challenges, and the handwash challenge. This innovative self-isolation solution not only keeps friends connected but gets them to showcase their creativity. Also, some local deejays like DJ Miller, once in a while, host Instagram parties where they entertain their fans with some of their favorite mixes. Although quite a new concept to most Rwandans, many party lovers are jumping on to the new craze and inviting their friends to join in for some fun.
