Airtime Launches

http://blog.airtime.com/post/24471686727/hello-world

by kurtvarner • 14 years ago

26 57 14 years ago

blog.airtime.com

antidaily• 14 years ago

No demo or screenshots?

samratjp2• 14 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/05/airtime-experience-together...

Toshio• 14 years ago

I don't have Facebook. Does Airtime provide alternative ways to sign up, and if not, why not?

oinksoft• 14 years ago

Yea, I just took that as a statement that this software is not for people like me.

samratjp2• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Facebook Connect likely solves the dick problem.

r4vik• 14 years ago

I'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.

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

We 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• 14 years ago

I 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.

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

Read 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• 14 years ago

Chatroulette 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• 14 years ago

Yeah - 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-frie...

graupel• 14 years ago

I just told a co-worker that AirTime was like 'Chatroulette with pants".

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

When 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• 14 years ago

Well it's a very pretty website. I really like the design.

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

Brought to you by the genius and taste of Matt Cahill, our Lead Designer. Illustrations by Shyama Golden.

WiseWeasel3• 14 years ago

They 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.

_pius3• 14 years ago

It'd be hard to have a more proven founding team than theirs.

WiseWeasel3• 14 years ago

That's what they said about Color.

psychotik• 14 years ago

A 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.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

I guess they can argue that part of the Airtime brand is the founders and/or that they want to give the product a "face".

Centigonal2• 14 years ago

I 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."

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

Here is our introductory video to give you a taste of the product:

https://www.airtime.com/about

We're still working on our team page, we've been a bit busy lately.

look_lookatme2• 14 years 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.

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

This is boilerplate. The important part is having the freedom to keep the site absolutely safe.

look_lookatme2• 14 years ago

What do you mean "safe"?

calbear812• 14 years ago

Besides 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?

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

Airtime 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.

calbear812• 14 years ago

So 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.

ryanmerket2• 14 years ago

This 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• 14 years ago

Well, 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...

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

The 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.

sunpatel• 14 years ago

i think why charroulette succeeded was definitely because of the anonymity

ryanmerket2• 14 years ago

I'm of the opinion that it takes more than 'natural curiosity' to convert someone to an engaged user.

Fedons2• 14 years ago

I'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...

hy3lxs12• 14 years ago

We 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• 14 years ago

The 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Today 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• 14 years ago

There are a number of players doing live video, but I believe what they're arguing more on is the networking aspect.

olog-hai• 14 years ago

Tinychat[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/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/vchatter-launches-a-pg-rate...

Dexec• 14 years ago

Demo video: https://www.airtime.com/about

Centigonal2• 14 years ago

I'm so sorry for being such a pedant, but I have to get it out somewhere:

"Whom." Not "that."

MartinCron• 14 years ago

This is as good a place as any to get your "whom" out.

csel• 14 years ago

Let 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• 14 years ago

The UI is horrendous. Especially if you attempt to use it without a video camera.

SoCool• 14 years ago

I don't have facebook account and I don't want to signup for facebook. How do I use airtime ?

Airtime Launches

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