Airtime, The New Social Video Service From The Napster Guys, Goes Live

Chat with friends and strangers with shared interests.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the two guys who founded Napster in the late '90s and launched the filesharing revolution, took the wraps off their latest high profile project today in Manhattan. It's called Airtime, and this time the revolution is all about video chatting.

Airtime picks up where Chatroulette, the viral web app that let people chat with random strangers back in 2010, left off. This time, though, everything operates via Facebook Connect, so everyone already has an established and verified identity. At the announcement, Parker said he hoped people would use the browser-based service to chat with their friends, but also strangers who have shared interests.

"We don't want to reinvent the social graph, we don't want an application to download, that's an archaic model," he said. "But most importantly we want to bring serendipity back to the internet, everyone is a participant, and this is an environment for live performance."

On Airtime you can find new people to chat with by clicking on a given interest, like yoga or Jimmy Fallon. From there you can either chat anonymously or add that person as a friend. The service also lets you share web videos from YouTube and watch them together live, similar to Google+ Hangouts.

Airtime is up and running now, so check it out for yourself and let us know what you thing.

[via The Verge]

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