Here's how to use Houseparty, the live video app that teens are going crazy for

Houseparty

Anyone who spent a lot of time online in the early 2000s will remember whiling away the hours popping in and out of chatrooms and instant messaging their friends. 

But in the years since AIM faded into obscurity, nothing has really replaced instant communication for teens. While Snapchat came close, Generation Z — the cohort born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s — has moved on to another app: Houseparty. 

Houseparty is a mobile app for live video chatting. Unlike Facetime or Skype, you can have up to eight people in a room and have several "parties" going at once. It's like a video version of a chatroom, and teens are going crazy for it: the app launched last February and now has more than 1 million daily active users. The app is the 18th most popular app in the App Store and the third most popular social networking app. 

Here's how to use it. 

Houseparty is brought to you by the same team that launched Meerkat, the once-popular live-streaming app that exploded upon launching, but quickly lost steam when Twitter blocked the service and bought Periscope, Meerkat's rival.

But the Houseparty team doesn't shy away from the troubles Meerkat faced. "When we were able to pull away from the hype and look at Meerkat’s numbers, what was clear to us was that we hadn’t succeeded in building something that was a daily habit, that achieved our mission of connecting people in the most human way possible when physically apart," Sima Sistani, cofounder and COO of Houseparty, told Business Insider.

So the team stuck with the idea of live video, launching Houseparty on December 29 under a pseudonym. But Sistani says it wasn't about being stealthy — it was about "launching in a vacuum and really understanding our users," away from the Silicon Valley hype machine.