Rounds

» see rounds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

rounds came out of tel aviv wanting to turn video chat into a place you hung out and did things together, all on camera. i was never that person over video. the calls that mattered to me were typed first and spoken second, and mostly on msn, one window at a time. a group of friends doing activities on webcam was a mode i just never adopted.

so this is from the outside. rounds was a video-enabled social network, which is a heavy phrase for a simple idea, a call where the video was the room and you filled it with other things. you could pull up a youtube clip and watch it in sync, or open a small multiplayer game, while your faces stayed on screen around it. it started in february 2008 and became a phone app as smartphones took over.

for a while it worked. it rode the facebook platform era, when apps grew by plugging into your friend graph, and it pulled millions of downloads doing group video before that was a normal thing a phone did well. it was early to the idea that a call could be shared attention, not just two heads talking.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the core bet was that people did not want to just look at each other, they wanted something to do. so rounds bolted activities onto the video, the shared clip and the quick game, so a call had a middle instead of an awkward silence. back then that was a fresh read on why video chat felt stiff.

i only saw this later. still, it belonged to a small crowd of video-social apps, the israeli startup scene had a few, all trying to make the camera social rather than one-to-one. the trouble was that the big platforms were circling the same space, and a standalone app needed a reason to keep people that the platforms could not just copy.

~ the cracks ~

building on someone else's graph is a good way to grow and a bad way to stay safe. as facebook changed how apps could reach friends, the cheap growth that lifted rounds got harder, and group video was about to be something you could do inside apps you already had. a clever standalone was a tempting thing to buy and a hard thing to keep alive on its own.

~ the actual end ~

in january 2017 kik, the canadian messenger, acquired rounds for a reported sixty to eighty million dollars and turned the tel aviv office into an engineering center for its own product. the team was the prize. honestly, the service was not.

the app itself did not survive the deal. on february 2 2017 rounds closed access to its chat rooms and stopped being a place you could go. the people carried on inside kik, the thing they had made did not.

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