The main differentiator for Cabana is the ability to watch a video together with five other people.
You can watch videos while you wait for your friends by choosing from the suggested clips on the homescreen. How often do you share videos in your group chat to get the amusing reactions from your mates? Cabana will be run as a completely separate app.
If the concept for this sounds similar to Houseparty, the video-chat app that achieved a stealthy sort of popularity a year ago, that's because it is. "Being there while they watch it for the first time - that experience of watching them experience it for the first time - that's a human experience that everybody's gone through at this point".
Cabana is essentially an app that allows you to watch YouTube videos with up to six friends simultaneously. Tumblr is mostly for consuming and sharing stuff in a community of strangers - often anonymous - who share the same interests (say, the same Korean boy band, or drawings of Sherlock with antlers).
Finally, it's unclear what Cabana really has to do with Tumblr at all.
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Like Houseparty, Cabana immediately launches users into their own broadcast, and it'll alert all their friends with a push notification. And I and everyone I know who use Tumblr would sure as hell fall in love with some fixes to make the original app and site more usable-like, I dunno, making it easy to reply to a reply, follow from a sideblog, or add images to a post on mobile-rather than devoting time, energy and resources to video chat. It's created to let people easily jump in and out of chats, making video chatting a lot more casual than it's always been on the web.
But that also brings up another issue: what can Cabana do to stand out, if a YouTube integration is its only unique feature? "It's a chill fruit", said Jason Lee, Director of Product Management at Polyvore Labs, in an interview.
"The younger demographic really took to the spontaneous concept of hanging out", Lee said. Well, now you'll get to see those reactions in real time.
In its persistent quest to make the world a more distracting place, technology has blessed us with a flawless way to waste time: Cabana, Tumblr's first standalone app.
But as someone outside the target age range, I already know I'm going to stay far away.
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