Human Connection 🤲
We all search for our people and communities. We seek human connection; people who can lift us up and understand who we are. LIVE Video is about helping people find their people. It began as an experiment in live streaming video on MeetMe's profiles, and has since become a syndicated live service with over 28 million monthly users worldwide.
The Meet Group regularly hosts hackathons where team members are given three days to work on whatever project they desire. I had been advocating for us to explore live streaming video, and this was the perfect opportunity to showcase its potential. With the help of two developers, we spent the next two days integrating a live video service into our existing chat and profile. While it wasn't perfect and certainly not scalable, it worked. The decision makers took notice, and six months later it became the highest priority product in our pipeline with me leading the charge.
The very first LIVE designs in MeetMe circa 2016
This project was my first opportunity to lead a feature from start to finish. It was, and still is, a very personal project because so much of what I experienced in life taught me what this project could and should be. As a citizen of the internet throughout my early teens and adult life, I understood the positive impact of giving users tools to share their lives and build communities around themselves.
Over the past six years, LIVE has evolved into a third place for many of our app community members. People from MeetMe, Tagged, Skout, and partners like Plenty of Fish meet online to chat, flirt, hang out, and make connections. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, it became a vital part of so many community members' lives as it was one of their only ways to have those much-needed social interactions along with providing them with a revenue stream when many other opportunities were closed for business.
Our LIVE service features: