Airtime Launches | Hacker News Reader

Airtime Launches

blog.airtime.com

26 pointskurtvarner57 comments

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.

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.

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".

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."

"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.

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

What do you mean "safe"?

When 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 :)

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.

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

That's what they said about Color.

True, which is precisely why Color was able to raise what it raised.

Thank 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

If your point is that investors are willing to fully fund notable, proven founding teams, I suppose we do agree.

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

Please send your facebook id to feedback@airtime.com to help us track this. Thank you!

I've just sent an email.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

We'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.

oh, 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.

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

i think why charroulette succeeded was definitely because of the anonymity

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

"Whom." Not "that."

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

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)

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

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

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

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

No demo or screenshots?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Facebook Connect likely solves the dick problem.

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.

That number would be still too high for us. We want virtually zero.

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.

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 ?

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