Cool: Rounds for Facebook Lets You Movie Talk And Play Games Or See YouTube Movies Together
Since the launch of their Facebook app last August, interactive movie talk service Rounds has emerged as one of the best places to talk, play games, interact and have joy with your friends on Facebook. In five brief months the application already boasts 300,000 monthly active users and Rounds is celebrating with the launch of a brand fresh movie talk feature called Random Rounds that lets users interact with randoms on Facebook. It's like Chatroulette only a entire lot less icky and a entire lot more joy!
What the movie doesn't display is all the cool interactive things you can do with your friends while you talk on Rounds, from watching YouTube movies together, browsing Flickr pictures, writing Facebook status updates together, taking snapshots, and playing all sorts of joy games from Truth or Dare to Space Invaders, Tetris, Pick Up Tucks and more. They also told me that they've got a Pac-Man game coming soon. Many of these arousing popular games have been made possible through Rounds partnership with Dassa Games, an Israeli game development company, and they also have opened their platform to developers. However, Dany made it clear that despite their superb game selection Rounds does not aim to be a gaming company. Rather, they are doing as much as they can to improve and ideal the interactive movie talk practice, and I think they're undoubtedly on the right track, especially with the latest launch of Random Rounds.
Dany says, “We believe that Random Rounds offers users a unique practice by permitting members of any age, from any country, to play, share and create memorable photo booth snapshots while meeting someone fresh. Whether it be through the different activities, the interactive features, or the social matching mechanism that we've created, Movie Talk Rounds bridges the gap inbetween the offline and online worlds and proceeds to connect users in a more private, emotional and memorable way.”
For now Random Rounds is pairing up users based on their age, but they plan create and utilize extra matching options in the future. Something that I think is fairly cool as well is that when you talk with random strangers using the Movie Talk Rounds application you will be provided with tips about the person you are talking to such as their interests and questions to keep the conversation going.
But as with every random talk service out there people are roped to have concerns about the types of people that may end up on the other end of their talk. These concerns have grown of course as a result of sites like Chatroulette where it is more common to wind up talking to some creep with his pants around his ankles than a friendly face. So naturally, one of my largest questions for Dany and Natasha was how they are keeping Rounds clean and what they are doing to maintain the privacy and security of their users. They are taking a number of precautions:
- For starters, members real names and a link to their Facebook account is shown, so Random Rounds is not anonymous like Chatroulette.
- To deter users from creating fake Facebook profiles to surf Random Rounds anonymously, only users with more than one hundred Facebook friends are able to use the Random Rounds service. If you've got less than one hundred Facebook friends you can only talk with your friends.
- Members are only connected to other users within their same age group.
- Rounds also utilizes a powerful reporting mechanism to single out the bad users. If you manhandle the system and are reported then you risk being blocked permanently from Rounds and will be reported to Facebook and risk losing your account.
Check out a duo of user snapshots from the Facebook below. If you'd like to see more you can check out Rounds two thousand eleven Snapshot slideshow on Slideshare. Have you used Rounds in the past? What do you think of the application's fresh random movie talk feature? Will you give it a shot?