I heard all the buzz and decided to try it out for myself. I know I may be a few years past the ideal demographic for this site but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So last Friday nite I went to Chatroulette which is a website that pairs random strangers for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online video chat with another randomly selected visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection by clicking the next button (F9) or report (F2) both you will have to use quite often. In doing the research for this article I of course came across the Wikipage for Chatroulette that gave the run of the mill details about the founder - a 16 year old from Moscow by the name of Andrey Ternovskiy. He apparently wrote the program for ChatRoulette in 48 hours after being frustrated with Skypes limited abilities. Now I bet he never thought it would lead to him being flown all over the world all the while being courted by every big name in technology. He is soon to be the next multi-millionaire from instant Internet fame before he is even old enough to blow it at the club. I commend the young fella. His friends doubted him and he still built it and took the chance. He felt it was a great idea and users took that and created their own visions of chatroulette and thats what makes his web-app so dynamic.

Now for the good part(s)…

When you first get on the site and agree to the terms (16 yr+ and the promise to be clothed) you begin to take notice that things can go horribly wrong. The first chat that popped up for me was a fully nude man. Not having a full understanding of the ChatRoulette concept I had to endure the guy for at least 10 seconds. You must know where and how to use the Next (F9) button! So my second encounter was with another pervert who was obviously not looking to chat with me so he skipped me and thank god. That’s ChatRoulette, you simply hit next until you meet someone who shares your interest. I start by finding someone who has their clothes on and their hands in plain sight. Then I will begin a chat.

When were those stats taken?

TechCrucnh actually ran stats on ChatRoulette and stated that “approximately 1 in 10 of feeds from Chatroulette are users exhibiting themselves in the nude“. I’m not sure where or when they took that calculation but I would lean towards at least 4-5 out of 10 are just perverts looking for who knows what. Now if that’s your thing go for it, but I was looking to meet new people from all over the world. I thought that this was what it was all about.  I thought that’s why this kid built it.

So after about fifteen F9’s in a row I came across a young couple. They had their clothes on and they even looked normal. So we began chatting it up. They were from Serbia and were just coming back from partying. They were nice and normal. They wanted to know everything about New York City my career, my life and I wanted to know about theirs too. They lived in a really nice place from what I could tell from the view behind them. The woman was a buyer for a big retailer and the guy worked in software programming. We talked for about 30 minutes and at that point I realized the power of this site. It truly makes the world a smaller place. I ran into a few more normal people from Paris, Nigeria, India to Austria, Alabama, Norway and Brazil and had lengthy discussions and it was really fascinating to randomly meet real people online at anytime of the day. We are pretty much the same no matter where we are from, I realize that just living in my diverse city and my diverse set of friends and colleagues is very rare. Most people have no diversity where they live and this is certainly a tool to explore other people outside of their geographic realities.

Where can this go?

I can see the day when this type of application is used at a huge corporations to meet and communicate with new people within the organization. Say an Art Director in Austin can randomly talk to someone in Accounts Receivables in Boston. That virtually re-invents team building. Or maybe it takes speed dating to another level. The next evolution of Chat Roulette has to come by more defining and categorizing it’s users. So say if you wanted to talk about the baseball game with fellow Giants fans or discuss American Idol in a room dedicated to each contestant. Maybe even a way to meet new people in your city or your suburb. It may even be integrated into a social application such as Facebook. Who knows, but the groundwork has already been laid.

A movie about Chat Roulette by Casey Neistat