iMeetzu: Free Random Video Chat

A definition first, because the name oversells it slightly. Imeetzu is a video call with one stranger at the far end and no way of seeing anybody else. When that call ends a different one starts. There isn’t a great deal more to it.

Thin, maybe. But look at what’s missing. Meeting people online normally starts with a set laid out in front of you — a grid of faces, a stack of cards, a column of whoever is nearby. The set exists to be chosen from. So you weigh them against each other, because weighing is what a set is for.

Here you can’t.

Nobody is being measured against anyone, because there’s nothing to measure them against. You get whoever happened to be free, in the order the site had them, and an evening built that way is unplanned in a manner no app with a shelf of candidates can manage. Nothing needs fetching or installing first either, and past midnight that tends to be the difference between doing it and not bothering.

You take them in the order they come

That’s the cost, and it’s a real one. With nothing to sort, there is no skipping ahead to the promising one. You go through people the way the evening produces them, and a lot of them end in four seconds — a shrug, a hand reaching for the key, gone. Some nights it’s twenty of those in a row.

It thins out badly mid-afternoon and fills back up once people are home and fed. From about ten at night it stays busy well into the small hours, which is when the better conversations on Imeetzu tend to land, probably because nobody still awake is in a rush. Honestly, there isn’t much else to report about who’s around.

It works out closer to a bar queue than to dating. You talk to the one beside you because you are both standing there, and adjacency picked them, not you. Sometimes that turns up somebody no sorting mechanism would ever have offered you. My best evening on it was a woman close to two in the morning with a bicycle upside down on newspaper in her front room, mending a puncture and narrating the whole repair. She never once asked what I was hoping to find.

Four small things that help

• Have a question spare. Not a clever one. Asking what the weather is doing there has rescued more of my calls than anything I ever planned in advance.
• Headphones. Speakers put a faint echo of the other person back into their own ears, and they’ll usually blame the connection rather than mention it.
• Prop the phone on something. A stack of books beats a steady hand. A picture that has stopped swaying does more for you than a well-lit one.
• Meet the pace you’re given. Quiet people rarely want to be jollied along, and someone talking fast at midnight is usually glad you kept up.

Comparing takes two people on the screen. You only ever get one.

Being decent, and what to do when somebody isn’t

There are moderators, and the report control sits inside the call rather than three menus away, so flagging somebody costs you no more effort than moving on does. Use it. It’s the only signal the site gets, and one report with a genuine complaint behind it does more for the next person than a hundred silent skips.

• Assume the other camera is on. Nobody here has agreed to be filmed.
• Leave your street, your workplace and your surname out of it until you’ve decided you want to.
• If somebody says they’re going, let them go without a second ask. Nobody owes you the back half of a conversation.
• Under-eighteens get reported, not lectured. That one isn’t a judgement call.

To be fair, nothing here promises you’ll meet anyone in the way the word usually means. Some people do; far more have a decent half-hour and log off, and a site claiming otherwise would be inventing figures it has no way of seeing.

The first four will probably be nothing. Sit through them without measuring anyone against anyone, and see what the fifth turns out to be.