A seated, tight-faced Olivia Munn grabbed the mic. "We were on it last night, it does work" she told a crowd of at least 100 tech journalists, TV reporters and venture capitalists. "This is not how it's really operating, I swear to fucking god." She, along with everyone else on the stage, had not been having a great morning. She was in New York, along with Joel McHale, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jim Carrey, Ed Helms, Jimmy Fallon and Napster cofounders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, to launch a startup called Airtime, and the presentation had ground to a halt for the fifth or sixth time, due to technical difficulties. She had also, just minutes ago, done this:

Yes, that's Snoop Dogg in the chat frame. Yes, Munn made this joke: "sorry, there's a white man calling, which means you have to go." And yes, people laughed. Minutes later, a visibly frustrated Parker mused out loud, "nothing like a successful product demo," as Jim Carrey hammed it up over an Airtime video chat, plodding through the same bizarre reverse-use-case-simulation as all the other onstage celebrities: appearing on Airtime, then quickly revealing that he was, in fact, behind the curtain the whole time. Jim Carrey made a joke about his "pubes" then bounded out from stage left. Joel McHale had by then appointed himself a sort of disaster control emcee for the evening, gamely drawing attention away from the technical glitches, perhaps even a little too well. About mid-way through — and I'm 99% sure I heard this correctly — Parker muttered sarcastically to McHale after unsuccessfully trying to take back the floor, "well, it's your show." McHale grimaced. "I can't thank you guys enough, you took a completely fucked up situation... and actually salvaged it," Parker said to his celebrity panel, a group he told us were mostly friends, not targeted spokespeople. It had been two hours since we showed up, and we had barely talked about Airtime.

The Airtime launch was a lot like using Chatroulette: when something wasn't going wrong, it was all about itself. The presenters joked about how things weren't going well, and the audience joked quietly about the presenters. It was very meta, in other words, and never gave Parker the chance to give an earnest pitch. That came afterwards, when he seemed more at ease. Here it is, basically: Airtime is video chat for your Facebook friends. It also lets you chat with other Airtime users who seem, based on Facebook information, like they should be your friends. It lets you share videos from YouTube and soon, says Parker, from Spotify. It also lets you share interests; opening a chat with another user shows you a list of things he or she likes, which a chat buddy can add to his own list with a click.There's a points system. The bigger concept, beyond just "video chat for Facebook," is that Airtime is a real-time social network. Facebook (and even Twitter), says Parker, are asynchronous, and therefore less personal, social networks. He thinks conversation online can, and should, be in real time. Airtime is the platform for that. A platform within a platform, but a platform nonetheless. "I feel like Facebook has its hands full with [its] vision," Parker told a group of reporters. "This is something that is very outside their purview." Facebook, which, remember, has a video chat function, provides the social graph on top of which Airtime sits. The difference is that Facebook video chatting is completely private; Airtime will use sharing techniques — the "your friends are using x app" and "so-and-so has left you a message" mechanisms — to spread in a much more public way. Parker told me he's not sure "we'll need to ever think about another social graph," so the integration with the Facebook mothership seems both technologically and theoretically complete.