Facelette: Chatroulette for Apple’s FaceTime
Well, that didn’t take very long: Just hours after Apple announced that its videochat service FaceTime was expanding from the iPhone 4 and 4th-gen iPod Touch to Mac OS X computers, someone — namely, programmer Zach Holman — has created an Chatroulette-like service that connects FaceTime users with random other FaceTime users. Dubbed Facelette, Holman promises that it will “[make] the internet way more stupid.” Also, he whipped it up in about an hour.
The site randomly displays a link to another user’s FaceTime account info: Click it and you’ll be on call with them.
Note that as it exists right now, privacy is virtually nonexistent: Holman recommends “open[ing] FaceTime.app, go into File => Preferences, and create a new email address for this. You’ll have to confirm it, so make sure it’s not a complete phoney. lol.” If you do not do this, people will be able to easily harvest your email address, so this step is no joke.
Privacy policy: dude, you’re submitting an email or phone number to a public site for strangers to call you. Let that sink in. Cool! That said, this is fun. If you stop using Facelette for more than two minutes, Facelette will consider you “signed out” and won’t display your FaceTime ID to anyone else, ever. I’ll regularly purge all inactive accounts for good measure.
Privacy tl;dr: you’re submitting your stuff publicly, so watch out. But Facelette will absolutely protect your info otherwise.
With these privacy reminders in mind, click here to try it out.
(Facelette via Zach Holman via Top Tweets; TechCrunch | Facelette)
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