
What do you get when you cross Facebook, Chatroulette (remember that?) and Google+ hangouts?
Something like, Airtime, the hotly anticipated realtime video service from Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning.
The way it's supposed to work is fairly straight-forward: it pulls information from your Facebook profile on your interests and matches you with random users. Parker and Fanning say it will also try to avoid awkward silences by helpfully pointing out those connections and providing possible conversation topics.
The only problem? At the launch, the only thing that made a bigger splash than the hoarde of celebrities roped into participating was how often Airtime crashed. Olivia Munn, Snoop DOgg, Jim Carrey, Ed Helms, Julia Louis Dreyfus and more were put in the awkward position of improvising while engineers tried to iron out bugs and fix glitches.
The Airtime has been about 80% fail, but, hey, Jim Carrey is here. So it's all good. twitter.com/LanceUlanoff/s…
— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) June 5, 2012
The awkward launch wasn't Airtime's only out-of-the-gate stumble. Concerns have already surfaced over the service's privacy policy: Airtime captures video and audio of user's conversations--ostensibly to keep people from flashing their naughty bits (such as with the infamous Chatroulette).
Airtime told Forbes: "Airtime does not record any audio or video conversations without the user’s explicit informed consent. Airtime takes snapshots of users periodically to ensure site safety. Text conversations are saved and visible to the user indefinitely in Airtime to provide a better user experience."
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