(Photo: flickr.com/christmas-on-mars)

Tech's golden party boy, who was once portrayed by a mugging Justin Timberlake, has hit a wall with his new startup, Airtime. Sean Parker, (in)famous for cofounding Napster, serving as the first president of Facebook and as a Spotify board member, opened up to AllThingsD about the struggles the video chat service has experienced since its star-studded launch in June.

Of course, Mr. Parker was quick to obscure genuine vulnerability with the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of Startupland. “Running a start-up is like eating glass,” he told AllThingsD. “You just start to like the taste of your own blood.” (Perpetuating the notion that startups are only run by masochists is an easy way to lend your endeavor the sheen of nobility and forget--for a moment--that we're talking about a service that's basically Chatroulette 2.0.)

AllThingsD also reports that Shawn Fanning, Mr. Parker's Napster cofounder, will soon take a backseat role at the company. Eric Feng, who was brought on after firing Airtime's initial product team to gut the infrastructure and rebuild it from scratch in time for launch, will also be moving on.

Mr. Feng and Mr. Fanning are two key Airtime execs, and their upcoming departures represent a huge blow for a highly hyped company that's only managed to net 10,000 monthly active users. The company's embarrassingly gaudy launch event stands in stark contrast to the barebones startup it's become three months down the line. But Airtime is betting on a host of new features it will roll out soon, like a "Reactions" option, which lets people record their reactions to YouTube videos to be played alongside them.

Still, Mr. Parker assures readers (and investors like Kleiner Perkins, which shelled out $33 million) that everything's going just fine. "We are iterating on our approach," he said, which is often just a fancy way of saying, "Please let a better idea strike us ASAP."

Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Julie Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Helms and Jim Carry at the Airtime launch.

There were perhaps 100 print, online and TV reporters drinking coffee and eating parfait at the press event in Chelsea last week. Media from Bloomberg, CNN, the Associated Press and the New York Times down to GigaOM, Business Insider and BuzzFeed were there for more than an hour watching a mini-parade of celebrities take the stage. Now that Airtime has been out for a week, we can assess the results of that massive press push.

No fewer than seven stars were there, and what did it get Airtime? According to AppData, Airtime has enticed just 150,000 people to try it out. Because Airtime requires users to log in with Facebook, that number includes every person who has tried Airtime in the last week.

Going from 0 to 150,000 new users is no easy feat. But still, that's less than 19,000 new users per A-list celebrity. It's just a tenth of the size of the viral video chat app Chatroulette at its peak. Considering the low barrier to entry--the app requires no download, just a Facebook login--and the nearly 10,000 articles about the app in Google News, it's surprising that Airtime's numbers aren't higher.

Maybe it's that, as everyone this reporter introduces to Airtime always points out, Facebook already has video chat of its own. Coupled with Socialcam, a social video app that is the most popular app on Facebook right now with more than 77 million users, Facebook video chat is a pretty close substitute for Airtime.

Maybe it's that the app, which uses Flash, tends to crash right in the middle of pitching your startup to Sean Parker. Or maybe it's just too much social pressure.

(h/t @andrewchen)

(twitter.com/cliffdailey)

Airtime, the Sean & Shawn bred startup that launched earlier this week, has slowly grown on us. Our initial reaction was in line with the majority of the Internet's: "Okay, it's Chatroulette without penises." But the more we've used the service, the more its benefits for networking, flirting and stymying boredom have revealed themselves.

But the thing is, since the site hasn't really hit critical mass yet, you tend to run into the same types of people over and over again. They're almost always very nice, but in our experience, they also almost always fall into one of the below five categories.

1. Journalists

Okay, this reporter is part of the problem, but few seem to be as in love with Airtime as the navel-gazing, network-savvy media elite. While the new app has been extensively reported on, few of our Facebook friends who aren't explicitly involved in media or tech seem to have caught on to the trend. We tend to wait to grant an app "phenomenon" status until it has been adopted by our Kardashian-obsessed, text-messages-in-her-sleep 20-year-old sister.

2. Startup Evangelizers

No where has the "everybody's a CEO" meme been more obvious than within the hallowed video chat grounds of Airtime. The vast majority of folks we've bumped into on the service are founder or executive-level startup employees. And, inevitably, when they ask us what we do, we are subjected to an impromptu pitch session on why their company is the Next Big Thing.

3. People You are Purposefully Not Facebook Friends With

Remember that dude you had a short but torrid Thing with back in college, and now sometimes you see each other in line for coffee and you make that unspoken "I'll pretend not to see you if you pretend not to see me" pact? Yeah, you're not Facebook friends with him for a reason, and you sure as hell don't want to run into him on Airtime.

4. The Lost, Lonely Men of the Internet

If this Businessweek piece is to be believed, a whole lot of dudes are looking at Airtime like it's a video chat version of OkCupid. We definitely had the experience of running into some flirty young men--one, in fact, who could barely bridle his joy as he blurted out: "You're a girl!"

5. Famous business leaders/investors/B-list celebrities

We all know Zuck uses it. So do Jessica Alba and Justin Bieber's manager, Scooter Braun, as well as Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley and Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus, who users apparently confuse for each other. Assumedly Olivia Munn, Jim Carrey, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg and Joel McHale use it too, since they were present for its launch. Personally, we're still waiting for Ryan Gosling to catch on.

Even Zuck uses Airtime.

Forbes freaked out your Betabeat writers recently with an alarmist post about the way Sean & Shawn's new videochatting service, Airtime, monitors the tool for inappropriate content. Apparently Airtime takes pictures of you sporadically throughout your videochat sessions to make sure there's no sexy cam action going on (reserve that for "off the record" Gchats, plz).

But the post got us wondering: what are some other issues--privacy-related or not--that you should be wary of when using Airtime? Here are a few we came up with.

1) The automatic privacy settings mean that Airtime can publish to Facebook on your behalf. An item recently popped up in the news feed of The Observer's news editor that showed who people had met on Airtime. This may or may not be alarming to you, depending on how strict you are about your privacy settings.

But fret not, fellow Airtimers, you can opt out of this by going to your Airtime settings and unchecking "Publish Open Graph Actions."

2. Bumping into people you barely know/who are professional competitors/you made out with at a party once/ you are purposefully not friends with on Facebook. Take, for example, when we tried out Airtime on launch day and ran into Alyson Shontell of Business Insider. It was a lovely conversation but we were both forced to acknowledge that hey, we occasionally write things for competing websites. Also, she nexted us. But then it reconnected us! Which was really awkward! Luckily we then had the chance to next her, because, as she put it, "karma is a bitch on Airtime."

3. That whole nexting thing. It's not like Chatroulette, where nexting has no consequences. If you next someone, you probably know them, have known them or will know them--or else Airtime wouldn't have connected you in the first place. There comes a point in the conversation when you've run out of shared interests to talk about, an embarrassed lull creeps up, and you have to say something like, "I'm going to next you but not because I don't like you I think you're perfectly nice I just am done speaking with you now have a lovely day!" *next*

4. This is perhaps the worst unintended consequence of using Airtime: It automatically signs you into Facebook chat. So if you're using Airtime, and then you close out of it and go back to your Facebook page, you will still be signed in to Facebook chat. Personally, this reporter hates Facebook chat because the only people who are on it are people from high school you haven't talked to in years and who want to send you video chat requests when you literally haven't seen their faces since 2005.

Okay, you've all been warned.

Olivia Munn and Snoop Dogg, Airtiming.

Expectations were starting to flag as a scrum of reporters stood in a milk-white waiting room waiting for Airtime to fix a few last-minute bugs. "Sean is freaking out," we overheard one Airtimer confide. (Or was it Shawn?) But media were ushered in just after 10:30, and when latenight talk show host Jimmy Fallon ran onstage to rock music to introduce us all to the "live social video platform," we knew we were in for a show. "Tell me how you guys met," Mr. Fallon asked Airtime cofounders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. The audience's terrible, frenzied applause was just getting started.

A-listers including Martha Stewart and Julie Louis-Dreyfus were reportedly on board to pimp the app, so Betabeat figured we'd be privvy to the kind of celebrity tongue twisting—"live social video platform," "real-time web social media video chatroom"—that often accompanies a tech endorsement. But we were wrong. The demo, which also featured Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Ed Helms, Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys and Jim Carrey, was all about the app. And it looks good.

Sean Parker's presentation was the only wonky bit. For all his dissing of Turntable.fm, Mr. Parker's intro was all about simultaneous Internet-ing. "Where are all the synchronous apps?" he asked at one point. Airtime satisfies two needs, as Mr. Parker sees it. One, the need to make the Internet more like the real world. And two, the need to make the Internet more serendipitous as social networks increasingly lock us into the same virtual rooms as all our friends. "The social network is basically constraining who you interact with and what you say," Mr. Parker said. "There's a part of me that feels somewhat bored by this." Betabeat felt a shiver as we pictured what happens when Mr. Parker gets bored.

The app, as demonstrated by the celebrity guests, requires no download—just a webcam and authentication through Facebook. Once in, users can two-way video chat with a friend or a stranger who shares the same interests, as determined by "likes" on Facebook. Oddly, the video is the same size for both people, so you're looking at your own blown-out face parallel to the person you're talking to. "I can't stop looking at myself!" Jim Carrey said.

Airtime is also integrated with YouTube, so users can search for a video within the app and watch it together. Mr. Parker always stays on the phone after he tells his fiance to watch a video, he said, because he wants to witness her reaction. With Airtime, it's as if you and the other person are sitting next to each other and watching YouTube videos together. If the person you're calling isn't there—Ms. Keys and Mr. Dogg did not answer on the first ring—it's possible to record a video message.

The second aspect of Airtime, which enables users to video chat with strangers a la Chatroulette, reminded this reporter of something else: Napster. When I was 13, I used to make friends in Napster chat rooms the way other people made friends in AOL chat rooms. We'd a/s/l, trade music and talk about punk rock and angsty teenager things. If I made a really good friend, we'd escalate to AIM. I am now friends with one of my Napster friends on Facebook. The Internet!

Mr. Parker and co. did not demo the serendipitous aspect of Airtime, but it was touched on in a video shown at the end of the event. A girl chats with another girl, learns to like street art, tabs over to a guy juggling, trades him in for a guy leaning over his guitar.

How will Airtime avoid being inundated with penises, the downfall of Chatroulette? It's connected to your identity on Facebook, discouraging creepers from flashing their junk. Airtime will be policing that shit, Mr. Parker warned, with a slide that listed Airtime's five most important priorities: safety, safety, safety, safety, and "no penises," which quickly resolved to say "safety," again. We'll just say for the record that there is no way that people won't be getting naked on Airtime. But it will also serve people who want to talk to their friends really well.

Airtime's staging demo, built for the event, started hiccuping just as Joel McHale of "Community" took the stage. Mr. McHale and Ms. Munn bantered as an increasingly agitated Mr. Parker apologized for having not slept. "Nice hoodie, very original," Mr. McHale told the Airtime tech fiddling with the display computer. Meanwhile, outside the room, the site had been live for an hour and some publications had already released embargoed reviews.

For all the hiccups, Airtime looked fun, well-designed and easy to use. (So easy to use that it's impressive that the event lasted as long as it did.) It's perfect for the Facebook crowd. If it works smoothly, it's hard to see how it could fail, even if the Chatroulette aspect doesn't take off. As for Mr. Parker's goal of re-humanizing the Internet, the jury's still out on that one.

Mr. Parker (flickr.com/mager)

Airtime, the super stealth video startup from Napster cofounders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, is launching at a press event this morning at Milk Studios in NYC, and celebrities on Twitter are apparently really, really excited about it. It's perhaps unsurprising, though, considering the company that Shawn & Sean are used to keeping: Airtime's investors include Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am and Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun. But who knew Martha Stewart was so plugged in to the startup scene? Perhaps Nick Bilton was right about tech being the new Hollywood.

We, too, are looking forward to the launch of Airtime, but could Sean & Shawn maybe fix their website first?

UPDATE: Jimmy Fallon is apparently hosting this thing.