There are plenty of social media platforms to choose from, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, SnapChat…you name it. The user experience they provide is addictive enough to keep you constantly connected, but here is the thing: most of the time you’ll only connect with people you know. When it comes to dating that’s a bit different but hey, don’t you want to just have a chat with strangers like in the old days?
This is what Koo tries to do: to bring back that experience similar to what Secret was. People from all around the globe seemed to have the need to communicate with each other, exchange thoughts, impressions, ideas without knowing who their partner in conversation really was. And that’s exciting.
Koo is a simple, easy-to-use app where you can sign up quickly and join the conversation in an instant. After signing up, the app allows users to join existing rooms or create their own rooms. However, every new room must be approved by the administrators and will appear in the Discover page (where all other rooms are displayed) only after gaining approval. When you create the room, you can invite others who are nearby, or use your friends from the social media networks – the latter option seems to be necessary to attract users, as the app has only just landed in the global App Store. You may want to skip that, since you don’t want to chat with your friends using a new app. There are other apps everyone else already uses to chat.
There might be a reason to initiate a one-on-one chat with one of your friends: those messages will disappear as soon as you close the app (a feature we’ve see in other apps, though, so nothing new there).
Still, I like the base idea of joining a conversation where you are anonymous, and you are what you say you are. And no one cares, as long as you obey the simple rules and you are a good conversationalist. How simple is that?
Koo uses your location to give you chat room options. Upon launch you can select a 1-mile or 6-mile radius, or just turn it off if you don’t see anything nearby.
And that’s the app’s major problem right now: despite being used by 50,000 users and having 1,000 unique rooms, Koo doesn’t have enough users to keep the conversation going. It needs you, the user.
Think of Koo like F. Scott Fitzgerald thought about large parties: “I like large parties. They are so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.”
So, if you want to mess around, or have a conversation with strangers about what’s bothering or exciting you right now, maybe you should give Koo a try. Download Koo for free from the App Store / Google Play.
