Bitstrips App Viral on Facebook, Allows Users to Create Cartoons

Bitstrips, an app where users can create mini cartoon versions of themselves and their life, has gone viral on Facebook.

"Basically, it's an app that turns you and your friends into a cast of cartoon characters," Jacob Blackstock, Bitstrips' chief executive and creative director, told the Baltimore Sun. "Then you can take those characters and put them into crazy scenes." 

Editor's Note: ObamaCare Is Here. Are You Prepared?

More than 11 million Facebook users have downloaded the app in seven months. The latest version, released earlier this week, features more than 1,000 templates to choose from.

Along with the cartoons, users can add captions and dialogue and can then share them with their social circle.

"In a way, Bitstrips are almost like a visual status update — users can depict how they're feeling or send messages to other friends," the Baltimore Sun reported. "According to Blackstock, the flexibility of the app is what makes it so attractive to its users, most of whom are in the 18-24 age range."

ProductReview reported Bitstrips' developers are hoping to extend the cartoons beyond Facebook.

"The good news is that the developers are going to make this feature available – you just have to sit back and wait for it to happen," ProductReview wrote. "Each time you boot up the app you are reminded of this very fact: sign in with Facebook, but with a message that signing into Bitstrips without Facebook is coming soon." 

But the app's popularity has also become a source of complaints for some users.

"The app itself seems to be hit and miss with fans," ProductReview wrote. "We have seen plenty of love for the comic style features that it brings, but also some feedback from users who say that they are already getting tired of it overtaking their Facebook feeds."

Jeremy Forbing of the Las Vegas Guardian Express wrote Thursday that he is already annoyed by the app.

"Modern society still maintains a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge that making an amusing comic is actually difficult, with similarly untalented persons trying their hand at the medium constantly, via a wide array of media," Forbing said. "Bitstrips is only the latest manifestation of this seemingly willful state of denial."

Editor's Note: Do You Support Obamacare? Vote in Urgent National Poll

Relates stories:

Archie Comics 'Afterlife' Veers into Horror; No Kids Allowed

Comics Look to Obama, Democrats for Humor