In a world of busy work schedules, social commitments, to-do lists and finding room for “me” time – going to the gym, taking care of personal health and wellness -- meeting someone to date can be hard. To help overcome this, some people (more than 40 million Americans) turn to the Internet for a little matchmaking. Other people face a similar challenge, but in a different area of relationships: How do you meet new friends in the real world?
A new WebRTC-based website hopes to help form new friendships with CreateAMixer, a social network that encourages visitors to attend video “mixers” based on topics created by users. It’s sort of like the online video version of Tinder: When users join a mixer, they can go through a slideshow that has photos of other guests attending. If they see someone they’re interested in, they click on that photo, and if the interest is reciprocated, a video session will initiate.
The website uses WebRTC. "The plus side for this is that there are no plugins needed, including Flash, for Firefox and Chrome users," said Chuck White, president and creative director, Wyanet, LLC, the company behind CreateAMixer, in a statement. "The negative is that we currently only support Internet Explorer through the Chrome Frame plug-in that Google offers."
Microsoft and Apple have both been silent when it comes to WebRTC. White stated that there are no plans to offer alternatives to support Internet Explorer. "Microsoft is just not on board with WebRTC in a way that is helping promote the standard,” he said.
The company is currently developing mobile apps for CreateAMixer. "WebRTC is still a bit of a moving target, so we’re still wrapping up development of the mobile apps for createAmixer," White explained.
CreateAMixer is currently in beta and available for free. After the beta period, a pricing structure for video services will be announced.
This isn’t the only service working to integrate WebRTC with social media. Developer Ben Nolan wants to build a peer-to-peer social network that looks like Facebook but works like instant messaging. He thought of using peer.js to support data channels, and sending JSON over the WebRTC connection. It’s a very, very rough prototype, but it does mark the shift and growth of WebRTC into more applications day by day.
There will be a similar discussion about the power of peer-to-peer data transmission at the upcoming WebRTC Conference & Expo in a session titled, “Using the Data Channel for More Than File Sharing.” The session will include a panel of speakers from Oracle, PubNub, Mozilla, TokBox, Amdocs/BlogGeek.me and Temasys and will cover the potential of new applications and services, including social, business operations and mass voting.
Want to learn more about the latest in WebRTC? Be sure to attend WebRTC Conference & Expo, Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, Calif. Stay in touch with everything happening at WebRTC Conference & Expo. Follow us on Twitter.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
