TikTok might be the video phenomenon Internet was waiting for

Late last year, I was in Mumbai talking to students at one of the city’s top colleges. I asked if they had used TiKTok. Not one of them had even heard of the short video app. Now everyone is talking of TikTok… even a Mark Zuckerberg.

If you haven’t heard about the new buzz in social, it’s time you did. It is not just another platform. Given its influence on users, it could well be a social phenomenon with long standing impact. But to explain TikTok, which thrives on 15-second videos, you need to understand where this ByteDance app comes from. Though originally launched in 2016, the app gathered a lot of new users, and steam, when it acquired Musical.ly a year later. So it has a lot of lip-sync videos that remind you of Musical.ly, as well as Dubsmash. There is lot of creativity too, especially with the editing software that comes built into the app. Top Indian users have millions of followers and lot of influence. In a bid to reach the dizzying levels of social reach, millions of Indians push their limits of creativity and inhibitions to secure more likes for their videos. This is creativity at the scale we have never seen before.