|
Posts Tagged ‘Tinychat’
Zugara - Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
matt - Monday, March 15th, 2010
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Someone took Facebook Connect functionality and mashed it together with Chatroulette’s video conferencing interface. So now you have Faceroulette! The only problem? Nobody seems to be using it quite yet. It remains to be seen if the whole appeal of Chatroulette is in the anonymous nature of the service or if services like Faceroulette, Redditroulette, Tinychat and others can gain traction in the marketplace with detailed and niche user options. Could Facebook will be rolling out a similar feature to Faceroulette sometime in the immediate future?
matt - Monday, March 1st, 2010
Note: This originally ran on 2/25/10 as an Op-Ed in AdAge. You can view that article here.
The numbers don’t lie. Live Video Conferencing / Streaming is on an explosive growth trajectory. Consider some recent stats below:
So the numbers above show that there is avid consumer interest for broadcasts that happen over the net, in realtime and streamed. But what of Interactive Video Conferencing? Though the events above offer social media integration they aren’t ‘true’ interactive video conferencing events. To date, most of these livestream broadcasts allow people to chat with one another about the event as it’s happening or to pose questions that a moderator will ask the subject of the livestream itself. But is this true ‘interactivity’? I would argue a definitive no.
Skype and live 1-to-1 video conferencing systems offer interaction between connected hosts in a live, connected video feed. So there’s already an inherent difference between the current examples of ‘livestreams’ and the systems in place for ‘video conferences’. Conferences being the keyword that implies basic live video interaction between stream members. But, apart from making headlines on Techcrunch or Mashable, most videoconferencing and livestreaming hasn’t achieved a level of critical mass adoption yet.
Twitter was the catalyst to help microblogging explode onto the scene and even went so far as to create an ecosystem around it – url shorteners, service clients (Tweetdeck, Seesmic) and so on. Similar patterns are emerging with the recent massive growth Chatroulette is experiencing. Part of this is due to curiosity (like every new trend) but I would wager that Chatroulette itself has just become the catalyst for interactive video conferencing and will accelerate adoption of video conferencing by the masses.
Here in no particular order are a few stats on the webcam and videoconferencing ecosystem:
Note: Chatroulette is a new video chat service that can be very NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It is suggested you read here before going to the site so you know what to expect.
So these are ‘official stats’ but what of Chatroulette? Since the service has only been out a few months, there’s not much in way of official stats but here’s what I’ve been able to dig up or have seen after using the service:
- Traffic has almost doubled in a week from 20,000 concurrent users on 2/13 to almost 40,000 on 2/20
- Approximately 75% of users seem to fall into the 18-24 age group.
- Though there is still quite a bit of obscene content, it seems to have diminished ratio wise with the larger traffic numbers. Maybe more ‘normal’ people are starting to use the service
- An ecosystem around Chatroulette is already developing. The 1st out of the gate – software that allows you to modify your live video stream. Manycam is one such system which allows for Augmented Reality-like features such as applying animations to your face through facial tracking.
- The most important observation – clones of the service are already appearing in record time – Redditroulette, Tinychat and others.
So what Chatroulette has shown is that there is definitely consumer interest in and a market for interactive video conferencing – especially with the Gen Y demographic. This is not surprising as both Gen Y and Gen Z are demographic sets that will be growing up with these types of interactive systems in place (similar to initial text based chat systems that were in place for Gen X.)
Furthermore, Chatroulette has shown that a simple UI and Flash based video conferencing system can work – efficiently and effectively. This probably isn’t good news for startups and tech companies that have been trying to sell 5-6 figure teleconferencing platforms and systems to businesses. Expect to start seeing ‘generated backlash’ against the Flash-based technology even though the genie is already out of the bottle.
Finally, this recent surge in traffic with Chatroulette shows that desktop based video conferencing only has room for growth. As adoption grows, we’ll also see more advanced uses of video conferencing which include more advanced interactivity. This is the main reason we developed ZugSTAR technology to allow Augmented Reality based interactivity between video streams.
In summary, it remains to be seen if Chatroulette itself is a fad or the next Twitter. However, what is has shown is that interactive video conferencing is here to stay and is positioning itself to be the de facto method of communication very soon.
Any comments, hit me up on Twitter @kobrakai or leave comments below.
Zugara - Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Zugara - Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
|
|
-
Most Viewed
-
Most Commented
-
Categories
-
Popular Tags
-
About
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
-
Authors
-
Must Reads
Interactive Marketing and Advertising
Social Media
Gaming/Entertainment
Technology
Website Design/Dev
Cool/Weird Stuff
Analytics/Stats
Mobile
Video
Automotive
-
Archives
-
Our Tweets
|