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Airtime Launches
- antidaily 14y agoNo demo or screenshots?
- samratjp 14y agohttp://techcrunch.com/2012/06/05/airtime-experience-together/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/05/airtime-experience-together...
- Toshio 14y agoI don't have Facebook. Does Airtime provide alternative ways to sign up, and if not, why not?
- oinksoft 14y agoYea, I just took that as a statement that this software is not for people like me.
- samratjp 14y agoI wouldn't hold my breath. Did you really expect the former President of fb (and Co-founder of Causes - also, fb login) to have a non-fb signup flow :-p ?
- huhtenberg 14y agoI was going to make the same smart-ass remark, but then realized that since I am not on Facebook, I am most certainly not interested in Airtime either. So that's actually a reasonable call on Airtime's part.
- kapilkale 14y agoFacebook Connect likely solves the dick problem.
- r4vik 14y agoI'm pretty sure Chatroulette solved the dick problem to, using image recognition. If you get your dick out you get sent to permanent dick purgatory with all the other dick wranglers. It seems to work. Dick hit rate has gone down from 1 in 3 to 1 in about 50.
- hy3lxs 14y agoThat number would be still too high for us. We want virtually zero.
- hy3lxs 14y agoWe will someday, just not today. For the initial user population, it's a better user experience to prepopulate your profile, video library, and friends list with data from fb.
- lucaspiller 14y agoI usually bash these posts, because being a developer who has previously built a number of apps using solely Facebook login I can understand why they don't provide another means of signup. For the apps I have built people who don't have a Facebook account aren't the intended target audience, and I believe it could be easily argued Airtime fits this category. The amount Facebook gives for free (friends, chat, payments, a verified email address, demographics) is really hard to replicate via other means. In this case though I think they ask for too much before giving anything or even saying what it is about, firstly access to my Facebook account, then requires enhanced permissions (which are meant to be optional, however the app barfs if you don't allow them), then requires you to allow Flash to access my webcam. It's more of a UX thing, but at least tell me what I am signing up to and show me what I can get out of it by allowing access to all of this.
- hy3lxs 14y agoRead your posts: allow us to prepopulate your video library with YouTube videos that you've shared on your wall in the past. XMPP permissions: we are deeply integrated with facebook chat. Your friends online on Facebook can send and receive xmpp messages to you on Airtime. Agreed that we could improve the messaging. Thanks for the feedback.
- wattjustin 14y agoChatroulette never became a commonly used service with its ease of anonymity. With Airtime putting a users identity in to the mix, I still can't imagine that people will hop on to video chat with strangers. I might be overly cynical about this, but video chat seems like a difficult service to build a user base around. Few people I know use Facebook's video service or even FaceTime to chat with others they already know, let alone strangers who just happen to like the same TV shows and bands that they do.
- bproper 14y agoYeah - I don't think many people will return to this again and again unless they can build an interesting product around live events. I could see people enjoying chat around sports or concerts. Also, they haven't show anything beyond 1-1 conversation, which means Google+ and Skype have a significant advantage. http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3065343/airtime-brings-friends-strangers-and-celebs-together-for-browser http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3065343/airtime-brings-frie...
- graupel 14y agoI just told a co-worker that AirTime was like 'Chatroulette with pants".
- hy3lxs 14y agoWhen you are connected to someone you aren't friends with, your profile is flipped to anonymous mode. So your identity is protected and you have the social freedom anonymity provides; but you are still held accountable for your actions for user safety.
- ghotli 14y agoWell it's a very pretty website. I really like the design.
- hy3lxs 14y agoBrought to you by the genius and taste of Matt Cahill, our Lead Designer. Illustrations by Shyama Golden.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThey just got $30M for this, before signing up any users, and we're supposed to believe the Good Times II are over? I'm guessing the revenue model is completely based on displaying ads before the connection is established, which makes them quite vulnerable to lulls in the advertising market. That's not even getting into whether the implementation is actually widely appealing enough to create a market for those ads in the first place.
- _pius 14y agoIt'd be hard to have a more proven founding team than theirs.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThat's what they said about Color.
- _pius 14y agoTrue, which is precisely why Color was able to raise what it raised.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThank you for reinforcing my point. I'm glad we agree. Maybe the fact they got $30M instead of $40M indicates that the bubble is popping... : P
- _pius 14y agoIf your point is that investors are willing to fully fund notable, proven founding teams, I suppose we do agree.
- psychotik 14y agoA blog post about a product launch with a sketch of the founders seems... pompous. If there is an image, I would rather it be a screenshot of the product or product related, or if you want people then one of the entire team. This feels, from the start, about the founders more than the product.
- citricsquid 14y agoI guess they can argue that part of the Airtime brand is the founders and/or that they want to give the product a "face".
- Centigonal 14y agoI feel like it's the textual equivalent of a filmed press conference, i.e., "hello, here we are and this is what we have to say."
- hy3lxs 14y agoHere is our introductory video to give you a taste of the product: https://www.airtime.com/about https://www.airtime.com/about We're still working on our team page, we've been a bit busy lately.
- look_lookatme 14y ago"You grant Airtime and its successors a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, sublicensable and transferable license to use, copy, distribute, transmit, modify, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, and publicly perform any such User Content, including without limitation, for the purposes of commercially promoting the site." I know this is pretty much boilerplate, but it's still a bit scary.
- hy3lxs 14y agoThis is boilerplate. The important part is having the freedom to keep the site absolutely safe.
- look_lookatme 14y agoWhat do you mean "safe"?
- hy3lxs 14y agoWhen you are chatting in the "public" area anonymously with other users, we take screenshots to monitor for abusive behavior. When you direct call someone from your buddy list, that is a private conversation that is not monitored (like a phone or Skype call). Also, legal says we should cover our asses :)
- calbear81 14y agoBesides the chatroulette meets facebook aspect, how is Airtime creating a live network that's any different than what Ustream and Justin.tv has already done?
- hy3lxs 14y agoAirtime is about extending your social graph one algorithmically-matched individual at a time (one-to-one). Ustream and Justin.tv are about broadcast channels (one-to-many) of which only a small percentage of the browsable directory are active at any point in time.
- calbear81 14y agoSo it's chatroulette but with more intelligence using your FB social graph. Like "you might want to talk to this person because they like cats and are friends with your friend Jane." This seems to have good applicability in the dating world.
- ryanmerket 14y agoThis has been done before (Chatroulette off Facebook) and numerous other Facebook platform apps. None of which have taken off. The core problem they will face is that most people don't browse Facebook (much less a video conferencing app) to meet new people...
- mrchess 14y agoWell, Chatroulette validated the idea that people are naturally curious to meet other random people, but the execution was poor. To me Airtime seems like Chatroulette done right -- user authentication, tools to interact with eachother, harder to post nudies... Now to see if it catches on...
- citricsquid 14y agoThe entire value in Chatroulette is the anonymity. You're absolutely right that Chatroulette is done wrong, the product sucks in so many ways, but what Airtime have done is take one of the parts that doesn't suck and "fix" it.
- hy3lxs 14y agoWe're trying to have the best of both worlds. You are not anonymous to Airtime -- so you can be held accountable for your actions in the public areas of the site. However, you are always anonymous to new people that you meet. We do not send your facebook id, name, or geolocation to anyone you don't know until you mutually friend them.
- citricsquid 14y agooh, that's much better. You should make that clear somewhere on the site before starting to chat[1], I signed up and was unaware that I remained anonymous so decided not to go any further. I saw my details listed so made the assumption everyone saw them. [1] I see "Anonymous You are anonymous until you send an add request" but that's after I started to search for people just now to check, I would never have got that far if you hadn't explained about anonymity.
- Aloisius 14y agoInteresting that they decided to launch in New York instead of San Francisco given they are based in SF. Also, I'm not sure how to feel about all the celebrities. I mean, I expect Sarah Jessica Parker to hock hair care products on TV for some giant multinational, not launch a chat system for Facebook. Still I wish them the best of luck!
- Fedons 14y agoI'm not sure if it's a bug (I'm using Chrome 20 beta, on Lion), but as soon as I've visited the Airtime landing page, my browser behaved automatically, as if I pressed the "Launch Airtime button" and I've instantly received a "Welcome to Airtime" email, even if I didn't accept their request of permissions. I didn't have a look to the code, but I really hope this is just a bug and not a malicious use of Facebook authentication...
- hy3lxs 14y agoWe would most certainly not do anything like that intentionally. The normal user flow is the standard facebook app authentication dialog that clearly lists all the permissions required for the site to work.
- astartupaday1 14y agoThe same thing happened to me. Chrome 19 on Lion. Just visited the site and within seconds I had an email from you guys saying I had created an account, even though I didn't click anything. You should fix this ASAP.
- Stampur 14y agoI would think they could sell it a bit better than "Create shared experiences with people you know, and people you want to know." The point of a one liner is to hook the reader with something unique and memorable--you could transplant this phrase onto half the social startups out there.
- j_baker 14y agoToday we’re excited to launch Airtime, the first live video network. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is flatly inaccurate, isn't it? Justin.tv has been doing live video for a while now.
- james4k 14y agoThere are a number of players doing live video, but I believe what they're arguing more on is the networking aspect.
- olog-hai 14y agoTinychat[1] and especially vChatter[2] have served the same purpose on Facebook for a while now. Exactly what is "first" about Airtime? [1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/tinychat-facebook/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/tinychat-facebook/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/vchatter-launches-a-pg-rated-version-of-chatroulette/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/vchatter-launches-a-pg-rate...
- Dexec 14y agoDemo video: https://www.airtime.com/about https://www.airtime.com/about
- Centigonal 14y agoI'm so sorry for being such a pedant, but I have to get it out somewhere: "Whom." Not "that."
- MartinCron 14y agoThis is as good a place as any to get your "whom" out.
- csel 14y agoLet me guess, demographically, Airtime just like Chatroulette and all the other dating sites, will have 99.5% of one gender and 0.5% of the other. This will be another sausage fest (no pun intended)
- chamanbuga 14y agoThe UI is horrendous. Especially if you attempt to use it without a video camera.
- SoCool 14y agoI don't have facebook account and I don't want to signup for facebook. How do I use airtime ?