I have asked other teens (or younger - I talked with kids as young as 10) why they use YouNow, a real-time video broadcasting app. I don't know exactly why a teen would broadcast themselves sleeping. And some, eerily, have the distinctive soft breathing sounds of sleep. (It usually seems around 50-plus people are broadcasting in the hashtag, but a lot of them are in complete darkness, so you can't actually see anything. On its popular #sleepingsquad hashtag, I can see about 20 sleeping teens at any given time. I've been doing it on YouNow, a mobile app and web live-streaming app that's a hit with teens. Lately, I've been enjoying a deeply creepy yet technically totally innocent new activity: lying in bed at night and watching random teens sleep. If Meerkat and Periscope are competing for the eyeballs of news junkie adults on Twitter, YouNow has already won with the hordes of young people who just want to hang out with each other.
As Meerkat and now Periscope are being touted as a possible future of news, YouNow is the livestreaming video app where teens are flocking.