It’s painful to remember — kind of like a drunken misbehavior — but for a brief moment not too long ago, the darling of the internet was Chatroulette, a web service that instantly worm-holed you into a video conversation with someone you’d never met. What killed Chatroulette was the fact that too many of those strangers were overly eager to display male genitalia.
But behind that flameout was a revelation: The web was ready to process video connections between people as easily as it did with text messaging?
Beginning Monday a startup called socialeyes is aiming to exploit that opportunity. The technology, which draws on a peer-to-peer approach, is built to handle continuous video streams. It can connect strangers to each other – but not randomly. You can choose your v-chats based on shared interests, and even view a video greeting that gives an idea whether it’s a proper stranger. And because the sign-in is through Facebook Connect, the person on the other side of the camera will not be anonymous. Thus, people are less likely to show everything to anybody.
But connecting with strangers is only part of the socialeyes scheme, and that practice probably won’t be the main use. (Though in the beta stage, some testers were able to reach out to a user in Egypt to get a real-time report from inside the uprising there.) Since socialeyes makes video sessions as easy to handle as text chats, it’s a visual version of full featured IM app. The multiple boxes on the main screen make a dashboard like the security office at a shopping mall — instead of views of storefronts and kiosks, there are people, viewed from the built-in cameras of their computers. (Mobile apps are on the way.) You can maintain persistent visual contact with several people at once, with the ability to conference some or all of them, or maintain solo connections.
If someone isn’t around, you can easily record a video message for them for later viewing. That’s in addition to a standard video intro that everyone is asked to record initially — a blend of elevator pitch, audition tape, and answering machine greeting. "It’s easy to move between synchronous and asynchronous," says socialeyes CEO Rob Williams.
Assuming that everything works smoothly when the service welcomes the masses, there’s going to be a lot of different ways to use these persistent connections. Williams (a veteran of Microsoft, RealNetworks and a successful messaging startup called Avogadro) clearly welcomes users to figure out innovative ways to employ his product. Right now, he says that a popular socialeyes use case is a virtual workplace: a group of people working on the same project in various locations (halfway around the world or twenty feet away on the other wise of the room) keep visual windows open and, when the need or whim arises, address some of all of the participants, just as if they were sitting in the same large cubicle. The ten or so engineers in socialeyes do this all the time; Williams calls it “geo-shifting the social graph.”
Williams’ co-founder and socialeyes chairman Rob Glaser (who had been his boss at RealNetworks) is also happy to see where users take the service. Among the uses he envisions are second screen socializing, where you and your friends watch the Giants game or an awards show together, even though your living rooms are spread around the city, or possibly in Shanghai. He also thinks it would be great for guitar lessons.
Both co-founders are vague about monetization plans, saying that the plan for now, a la Facebook and Twitter, is to go for scale and worry about revenues later on.
Making video a standard and potentially persistent part of a social and work environment opens up some dicey territory. Do people really want friends and contacts to see them in all their bathrobed glory? Will employers demand that remote workers keep the camera on, using socialeyes like a grown-up baby monitor? Will it replace real baby monitors? And though they may not be the rough and random surprises of Chatroulette, opportunities for sexual contacts abound. (One can only imagine Charlie Sheen’s socialeyes dashboard.)
But in the short term, people might do well to store a new perepheral alongside the mouse a keyboard: a makeup kit.
Are you ready for your close-up?
