twopointouch

And this post is sponsored by ANYwebcam.com Personal

The experiment continues. This was the first review offered me by ReviewMe, and naturally, in the spirit of experimentation, I accepted like a shot.

So, basically, it’s a tool to add a MySpace widget to your profile (it also supports other social networks) that gives you live access to your webcam from your own page, and obviously a feed from another user of the service. It is a free service that you can sign up for here. You ultimately pay with adverts on the website, it seems. Using Anywebcam is apparently pretty simple: just copy a Javascript into your MySpace profile and bob is your uncle, as they say. If you use MySpace to communicate with people who are geographically displaced from you, then this could be a real boon.

While mainstream users of MySpace might benefit from this sort of thing, there’s a good reason for many of them being put off by it. It is restricted to adult users, 18 and over. There are porn and dating sites advertised on the top banner of the site, and elsewhere. Maybe that is a good indicator of some of the people who want this sort of thing. It was interesting to see that “Over 8 million girls in [my] area are SEEKING SEX - FREE Reviews!!”. I wonder who conducts these reviews and the methodology for their results? As I understand it, there are only 4mn women in London. I do hope that they were not duped.

I’m pretty confident that there are healthy (!?) sex-chatline companies working off the back of MySpace and that this sort of service is pretty attractive to them. It’s really a shame, though, that a potentially useful tool should be drawn down to this sort of level. Judging from the marketing graphics, they started off as a service geared at teens, then realised the real money was in sex.

The site has a pretty massive T&C document that I haven’t read. Since it comprises acres of text, I would be surprised if any registered users had read it. Always a great sign of a company to trust.

I kind of wonder why Anywebcam hasn’t yet been killed off by MySpace themselves, in the same way that they have killed off other third-party widgets. Perhaps because they are not yet ready with an equivalent service themselves, or are anxious about possible sexual abuse and prostitution connotations to the service.

People reacting to the Techcrunch notice about ReviewMe and elsewhere said that it would be unlikely that people who posted negative reviews would get hired again. I’m not being negative deliberately. This is my honest (negative) opinion about this service - and, as you can see, it’s not quite as thorough a review as it might have been. Let’s see.