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Mobile App Review: TikTok
Snapchat’s in the rear-view mirror
You may not have heard of TikTok, but that’s because you’re not sixteen. If you have a teen, it’s almost a guarantee he or she is more than familiar with the fifth-most downloaded iOS app (as of this writing). TikTok trails only Instagram, YouTube, Gmail, and Facebook’s Messenger in downloads, two rankings ahead of Snapchat and three ahead of Facebook. If you care about what young people are doing with their smartphones, it’s imperative you become familiar with their latest social media fixation.
What it is
TikTok is simply a video sharing app, not very unlike the video sharing apps you’ve already seen. In fact, features-wise, there’s very little to distinguish it from the others: videos of a maximum 15 seconds in length, hearts (or likes), following, and sharing. Its main bragging point is an extensive music library for use in videos, shot in the in-app video recorder. The music library was undoubtedly boosted by TikTok’s merger with the lip-synching app Musical.ly last year. For our first video on the app, we added a song by Ledward Kaapana, a Hawaiian slack-key guitarist who has been nominated for a few Grammy awards.
What makes it different
TikTok’s most brilliant difference is the ability for a user to use the background audio of any public video as the background for his or her own video, and it’s one clue about why this app, among the dozens available, has connected with such a huge audience. You may hear TikTok referred to as a “meme-generator,” and while we were pleased to discover that it’s quite a bit more than that, a large part of its appeal is how quickly and freely users create their own versions of popular TikTok videos. We’re not even going to pretend to understand this one, but there’s a series of sound-alike videos using a 15-second clip from Village People’s “YMCA” where users sneak up on people and throw food at them. These videos, shot from the point of view of the filmer, show the user taking a piece of food from a refrigerator (often an egg or a flour tortilla) and walking toward the victim, throwing the item right in the victim’s face. Copycat videos alter the food item (in one case an office chair instead of a tortilla) or the target (a sink full of water instead of a friend or family member).
At its heart, this is what an internet meme is: one idea quickly and creatively copied by others and shared, inspiring other copies and more sharing. And TikTok’s easy “add this sound to your favorites” function lets users very easily shoot a quick copycat video and simply overlay the music (or other audio) right on top. It’s nearly automatic memeing.
Creating and consuming
If Snapchat made you feel old with its non-intuitive-for-old-people swiping gestures, TikTok is going to make you feel ancient, not as much with its functions, but with its content. You’re going to be astonished at the kinds of videos receiving tens of thousands of hearts: silly stunts like the food-throwing, weird drawings-in-progress that start off suggestive but turn out innocuous, dancing videos, and all manner of--we’re sorry to say--sophomoric humor.
However, TikTok’s algorithm for showing you video in the “for you” section is impressive. We quickly bypassed videos of young people doing stupid stunts with school furniture and found an impressive few videos of artists creating their art. One artist uses a syringe to fill the bubbles in bubble wrap with different-colored liquids to create gorgeous wall-sized murals. Another creates a surreal shot of a living goldfish in a goldfish bowl surrounded on a kitchen counter by hundreds of goldfish crackers “swimming” toward it from every direction. After giving a few hearts for these, our “for you” section presents us far more artistic-type videos than stunt or meme videos, much to our pleasant surprise.
Unless you’re very young, or unless your friends are also trying to get a sense of what young people are up to, chances are nobody you follow on other platforms is there on TikTok. We found exactly one friend, another early adopter who also has only created one video so far, for probably the same reason we did: to see what the fuss was about. You may as well do likewise if you’d like to be hip to the cultural references on Twitter, or if you’d just like to know what your teens are giggling about in the back seat while you’re driving them to soccer practice.
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