Paltalk, the Internet’s largest Video Chat community with more than four million active members, announced today launched Paltalk People 2.0.

Paltalk says it's the only social networking site in the world that allows users to communicate through video, voice and text chat. This is totally false. I've been videoconferencing since 1994 and have used every program out there. I used PalTalk a few years ago and I have a hard time believing it has four million active members. Back then there were less than a thousand people on the site at any one time.

In the plus column, PalTalk was the first company to combine video and voice communication with an online buddy list. Way ahead of everyone else.

The question becomes why isn't PalTalk as popular as Skype or Userplane?

I'll tell you why. Product positioning, marketing and management. PalTalk always looked clumsy, like Windows 3.1 and the video windows were tiny. It was never marketed well enough in the MSM (main stream media). Management of PalTalk and their competitors like ICUII and ISPQ didn't think big enough, hence glacial user growth. Most of the users never wore clothing. This doesn't add up to a high-growth enterprise.

The new message behind PalTalk is the ability to marry networked user profiles with a unique messenger that also gives users the ability to see and speak both one-to-one or to thousands of people simultaneously.

Maybe PalTalk has a renewed energy to take on social networking. It certainly has the feature set in place. I'm just not feeling it at the moment.

I went to buy the program and it asked me to log into my account, so I can't even tell you how much it costs. And it's PC only. I think most people would agree it's easier to video-flirt on Skype or a similar program for free.

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