official definition

houseparty was a video calling application that is (like the name suggests) conceptualized around a physical house party. once you added friends, you would get a notification whenever someone “[was] in the house,” motivating you to join them. inside the app, there were multiple “rooms” that could be filled with up to 8 people at a time. you could join any room of people, so long as you were mutual friends with one person inside the room, but rooms could also be locked to prevent anyone else joining.

imo

for me, everyone latched onto this app in late 2016. i was 15, a sophomore in high school, and i really enjoyed this app for the first few months. it was a fun way to quote “keep the party going” once my friends and i all returned home from school and extracurricular activities. i loved the thrill of how spontaneous it felt, similar to going to an actual party; seeing people “in the house”, and then texting my friends to open the app at the same time. houseparty also boosted my fragile 15-year-old ego, giving me the opportunity to talk to “cooler” friends i wouldn’t normally talk to outside of school.

in review

with this excitement, of course there were some downsides. in high school, not being invited to something that everybody else was going to was the worst feeling in the world. the same went for houseparty. if a room was full or locked, it felt like almost the same as watching all your friends hang out without you. 
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like with most apps, the excitement dies out and less and less people think to open the app, causing their friends to get no notifications, and never open the app. the houseparty notifications were also so incredibly annoying, i went and personally turned off every one of my friend’s notifications.