Institute For The Future

Hi Keek: kids, social media, and video futures

If you're interested in how young people live, what they're doing with their mobiles, and evolving social conventions around video communication, sign up for a Keek account, now, and spend five minutes a day for the next week randomly clicking on the latest Keeks. You won't regret it (but you may find yourself spending more than five minutes).

What you'll find: Under-10s, teens, and college students, at home in their rooms, hanging out with their friends, in the car, in the classroom (a LOT of these are being shot at school), and everywhere in between. Putting on make-up, singing, dancing, being bored, doing challenges (eat a spoonful of cinnamon, eat a spoonful of salt), talking about their social media, asking for follows, likes, comments, subscribers, and dares. From all over the US, the Caribbean, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Europe (check at different times of day for Keeks from different parts of the world). 

Keeks are up-to-36-second video snippets ("microvideos") recorded on a webcam or phone, mostly with no editing, and are the latest thing to be added to the long and ever-changing list of ways young people socialize and play with one other. We've seen the shift from text-based status updates to photo updates over the past few years, especially for younger kids. Now we're seeing video updates added to the mix. Of course the whole Kardashian family is there, and enough other celebrities are joining that the company just introduced verified accounts in late March. 

Couple of initial thoughts: 

• The list of possible social channels is impressive, as this photo from a Keek by a pair of 10 year old American girls attests (Keek me, Snapchat me, Kik me, Facetime me, text me, email me, call me, follow me, Instagram me, chat with me, Talkatone me)! Will using this many channels be a practice that sticks with these kids as they grow older, and their time becomes more scheduled? Will we see them consolidating into just a few services? Or will they be comfortable having this many different engagement modes and just moving from one to the next? 
• Duck face (also known as "MySpace face" according to KnowYourMeme!), kissing goodbye sign-offs, v-signs/peace signs, and sideways-sticking-out tongues are the lingua franca. Duck face is ubiquitous on Instagram but seems slightly less common in videos. [Note: compare with the aesthetic conventions of video back in 2008 described in our Future of Video report!] 
• "Hi Keek," "Bye Keek": many of the videos open with "Hey Keek!", which feels different than YouTube. I don't recall YouTube being thought of as an agent that people say hello and goodbye to. Keekers seem to be talking to a combination of their followers, their potential anonymous viewers, and Keek itself. We explored the question of audience to some extent in our 2009 Blended Reality report.

The company is headquartered in Toronto and has been gathering steam since late 2011. Their press releases say they're adding 200,000 users every day and are experiencing explosive growth in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, serving 83 million pages a day.