Airtime, a new video chat service which connects strangers, promises an unwelcome return to the 'Wild Wild West' days of the early web, writes Emma Barnett.
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| Airtime is the brainchild of Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning - the duo who created Napster. |
Airtime, in case you haven’t heard of it yet, is a new video chat service that allows friends, and crucially strangers, to talk - created by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the duo behind Napster.
After a cringe-worthy launch party for the service’s debut in New York, at which Airtime failed to work several times in front of a celebrity-studded crowd, it still isn’t clear why these well-known technology entrepreneurs think there’s a market for this product.
Here’s a description of Airtime’s raison raison d'etre: “Airtime shows users a list of contacts based on their Facebook friends at launch, but the focus of the service is a large "talk to someone" button which, when pressed, connects them to someone new in a video chat box.
“Participants are matched with preference given to whether they are nearby, share interests and are friends of friends - although any, or all, of these categories can be deselected before taking part.
“Users can see what they share in common to help spark conversations and choose whether to reveal their name.”
It’s being described as an upmarket ‘Chatroulette’ with filters – a similar-sounding service which enjoyed a brief spell of popularity a couple of years ago - until the site became overrun with unsavoury types.
Parker, an early investor in Facebook and now a big backer of Spotify, has insisted Airtime has a place because it will help bring “serendipity” back to the web.
He thinks that people in the Facebook generation are not able to meet somebody new online because their social experiences are now so restricted to their own networks.
Parker and Fanning say that Airtime will help brings back the ‘Wild Wild West’ feeling of the early web – where anybody could meet anybody.
But I don’t know anyone who wants a return to the faceless chatrooms that we did away with in nineties and early noughties. Most people I speak to only want to talk to their friends, not strangers, both online and off. They don’t have a desire to waste time talking to strangers. It’s the equivalent of picking up the phone and calling a random phone number.
And the people who do want to meet someone new are usually after a date – for which there are a variety of well-established dating sites.
The social rules online are pretty similar to the rules we like to observe offline. We already have one highly successful digital network which allows us to interact with strangers based on our interests and it’s called Twitter.
Equally, we also already have a popular video chat network which allows us to talk to whoever we would like (but usually it’s just family and friends) and that one’s called Skype.
In the profoundly social chapter of the web’s development that we currently find ourselves in, Airtime is a step backwards, not forwards.
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