It's been rough so far socially isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but it's important to help slow the rapid spreading nature of COVID-19. Still, humans are at their core social beings. We're meant to live in families, meant to live in communities and meant to experience life with friends. At it's core, that's what has made this time of social distance so very difficult.
My five year old wants to play with friends. My college age friends want to go out to the bar. My wife wants to go see her hair stylist...but they cannot, or at least should not.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, there are ways that you can still get your social fix while creating space and social distance for the betterment of mankind.
Google Hangouts Trivia Night
Have you used Google Hangouts yet? Most of the time it's a business tool to open up messaging, voice calls and video calls to connect people. Under present circumstances it can become a virtual living room for you to see, hear and hangout with your friends! You can do a video call with up to 25 machines connecting and people have been getting creative holding Trivia Nights despite the varied nature of quarantines throughout the world. One house is in charge of the questions and keeping score and the rest of the crew plays, pokes fun and enjoys each others company.
Netflix Parties
Netflix to the rescue again, and there's a new way to watch Netflix...together. It's called Netflix Party and it's a web extension to your browser that allows you to sync up a movie remotely on Netflix with up to 500,000 others, or your closest friends and opens up a chat window to the side to comment on your favorite parts with friends. CLICK HERE to learn more about Netflix Parties.
Twitch
The web streaming platform Twitch has primarily been a place for people to live stream their video games with a community. Lately though the platform has expanded to connecting people with celebrities and friends in a virtual chat rooms. You can loop in a bunch of cameras but most of the time it's one camera and a giant community of chatters conversing with everybody. Play games, do AMAs, watch funny videos together and just hang out