Chat Roulette — The Circus of the Internet

What new website has over 500,000 unique visitors a day and anywhere from 20,000 to 150,000 concurrent users? Hint: It’s certainly not this blog. It’s the interwebs latest rage, ChatRoulette.com, an overnight sensation created by a 17 year old Russian computer hobbyist. Chat Roulette has been featured in the New York Times, Mashable and Tech Crunch, among other sources. It piqued my interest when I saw such substantial media coverage. A quick search on Twitter shows almost universal intrigue about Chat Roulette and quite a few fans.

Chat Roulette is aptly named. Users fire up webcams and click through other users (literally clicking “Next” about once per second) until they find someone with whom they would like to communicate. The user-base spans the globe and at all hours there are people online clicking through images looking for the net “hit” of Chat Roulette. Users can type or speak their dialogues, some of which are made difficult by language barriers.

Chat Roulette has become a venue for exhibitionist sex acts and drug use. (I’m curious if the 17 year old expected this when he launched the site. There is a button to report indecent acts but I expect that it is clicked infrequently and ends up in ignored in /dev/null.) So, if a very brief glimpse of something indecent is going to ruin your day, avoid Chat Roulette.

Despite exhibitionist/voyeuristic tendencies of some users, it seems that the vast majority of users seem to be interested in just having a good laugh. I’ve seen puppet shows, magic tricks, costumes, parties and people just looking for a cure to common boredom.

If you’re curious and you’re willing to smile for the webcam (and risk ending up on YouTube too because a number of videos seem to be appearing), visit http://chatroulette.com/ or http://chatrt.com/. It’s the 24 hour, 7 days a week, live circus of the internet.

P.S. Apparently it is easy to piss someone off on Chat Roulette without actually doing anything. If someone sticks their middle finger up at you on Chat Roulette, just do it back and click next.

P.P.S. This 17 year old is going to make a ton of money once the site displays paid advertisements.

UPDATE: From Chat Roulette’s website, “We are currently replacing servers. You may experience slight issues with connection. All perfomance problems will be fixed in 20 hours.”

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