Today Apple held their “Back to the Mac” event. I watched and was enthralled, but as a “fanboy” that shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me.
After announcing new versions of this and of that, Apple unveiled FaceTime for the Mac which you can download in its beta form here. The reasoning behind the move is to compliment FaceTime from one’s iPhone/iPod Touch by bringing it to your Apple computer. The move further merges OS X with features from iOS thereby keeping the circle of Apple life in perfect harmony. Perhaps that’s the reason the new OS X will be known as Lion, but I digress.
Soon after FaceTime for Mac was announced, something new, possibly creepy, but definitely interesting presented itself to the world, facelette.
The site states the following:
“it’s like chat roulette but with more apple products and stuff.”
That is clever and funny, but the creator of “The dumbest experiment ever,” Zach Holman, doesn’t stop there:
“Your FaceTime ID is the number or email address you use for FaceTime. We’ll share this with the people FaceTiming you. If you’re on a Mac and want to be a little cautious, open 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.”
How does it work? To begin faceletting (a new word), enter your FaceTime ID and hit the “FaceTime Me” button. That’s it.
Concerned about privacy? Here’s the site’s “Privacy Policy”:
“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.”
I have no plans of trying it, yet. That said, many will and one has to give Holman two very big thumbs up for jumping on this idea and presenting it in a straight-forward way, complete with some laugh-inducing comments and disclaimers.
What about you? Will you enjoy some facelette. time?
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