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Comment by klous | Hacker News Reader

When will FaceTime Roulette be coming out, so you can randomly connect to a stranger's iPhone?

I know two separate groups of people who are both already working on such a project.

Only two? I can only imagine that there must literally be at least 100 of these in development, and it will likely meet the same outcome as CR.

I'd imagine that one with more karma built into the system would have more <ahem> staying power.

I think a dating service built on top of Facetime (again, with karma) would be pretty neat. Sort of like virtual speed-dating. Meet random people that meet your "requirements" and get to know them. Upsell: Give out the app for free, but limit connection times and all connections are anonymous (but reporting is not). Paid app lets you maintain an address book and unrestricted connection times.

Alternatively, those with the "free" version of the app are branded as such (i.e., your connecting partner is told that you are a cheapskate), providing social pressure to show that you're willing to spend money to meet interesting people.

Policing the system is probably the hardest part - setting up the social conditions such that fraudulent claims are kept to a minimum (and require little to no input from the service owner) is a challenging task.

The anonymity feature (assuming you want to connect people together with FaceTime) will be difficult as your phone number is shared with the person you FaceTime call. I suppose it's possible that a proxy could be used, but I have yet to take a look at the protocol specs (if they're even available).

Yeah, having never used an iPhone 4 or FaceTime I was unsure of how it all worked. Given that it's going to be a standardized protocol, a FaceTime server would be necessary even if phone numbers weren't exposed, as you'd want to manage who can connect to who (and possibly for how long).

You could even monetize by interspersing ads into the video stream.

In fact that could be a better solution - that way you could avoid building an application and locking yourself to iPhone 4 users, opening your web service to other FaceTime clients.

Agreed. The first time I heard of FaceTime coming in iPhone 4, I immediately thought of making a ChatRoulette-like app.

However, I assumed lots and lots of others would think the same, and I was VERY wary of Apple pulling some kind of censorship rejection BS with it.... So I abandoned the idea within seconds.

They _know_ two.

Yeah, I got that. I was kind of implying that if you know two you should know twenty...

Facetimepartner.com --- it's here. They reached out to me on Twitter. I tried to use it, but I couldn't find someone to chat with.

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