Facelette: If Apple made Chatroulette

In November 2009 a 17-year-old Russian launched a little website called Chatroulette. This website has since attracted worldwide attention for both positive and negative reasons. Now with the launch of FaceTime for Mac, a clever coder has created Facelette.

If you type your FaceTimeID into the website, it will find you a random Mac user to communicate with.
FaceTime is a video-calling app developed by Apple for the iPhone 4. It has now been released in BETA for all Macs running on OSX Snow Leopard or later.

It’s a more hidden version of Chatroulette; you’re unable to use the site unless you’re on a Mac and have a FaceTimeID.

Zach Holman developed the app as what he described as “the dumbest experiment ever”. But since his site has been blogged about and even featured on some mainstream news outlets, facelette.com has been visited over a million times – not such a dumb experiment now.

You can go anonymous by selecting some privacy settings within the FaceTime app on you computer. But that takes some of the fun out of it.

The sites privacy policy does say “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.”

This is a casual way of saying: you’re online, so you’re going to give information away, get over it. Which is the way everyone should see their online activities.

FaceTime is an incredibly popular app on the iPhone and is gathering thousands of users for its Mac equivalent; as a result there is definitely a market for this website. Whether it will be a quick internet meme or fad is yet to be seen. While FaceTime offers free video calling to other Mac users I’m sure someone will be using it… but just imagine how interesting it could be when you’re able to make random video calls to iPhone users.