How to find friends on live.ly

When live.ly first released, it was about as bare bones as you could get. You could use the app to easily live stream video of yourself, which was the whole point, but you couldn't do much else with it.

The folks at musical.ly have updated the app several times since its launch, and while those updates haven't added a ton of functionality to live.ly, it's correct to say it does more than it did even a week ago and makes you feel like more of a part of a community of fellow streamers.

This is especially true if you have friends who already use live.ly. The early July update added the ability to find friends who are streaming on the app -- but only if you know their musical.ly username.

To find a friend's stream, simply tap on the (obnoxiously glowing) circle on the main screen, just to the right of the button that begins a new live stream. You'll end up on a screen that looks like this:

If you have friends who are currently live, they will appear above the section that says 'popular live streams.' You can also tap the big button that says 'find friends" to hunt for more.

Currently, the only option after that is to search by username. Here's where having a musical.ly account comes in. I searched for someone I knew I followed (Selena Gomez -- don't judge!) and was able to find her quickly.

If you find a friend on the service, you can tap a button to go to their musical.ly profile. That obviously requires you to leave live.ly, but you can return in just one more tap. If you happen to type in the username of someone you don't follow yet, you have the option of following them too.

Alas, the search function is not very smart at the moment, so if you type in anything but an exact username, it's not good, as it doesn't recognize partial names or chunks of text. Here's hoping this is something musical.ly continues to iterate on going forward.