Russian Roulette with Video Chat
Ever wondered what people were doing while sitting in front of their computer? You can now! All you need is a webcam and a little site called www.chatroulette.com. 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy from Russia set up this simple but intriguing way of meeting total strangers. Launched in November 2009, his idea has been featured in numerous news magazines around the world, including the New York Times, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and our very own 20min.ch here in Switzerland.
How does it work? You don’t need to register, just go the site, hit the “new game” button and chat away. If you don’t like who you see, click “next” and you get a new partner. As Robert J. Moore stated on techcrunch.com, 89% of participants are male, 11% female. There is an age restriction of 16 in place for the site, but no formal verification is conducted. This is certainly an issue, as chatroulette isn’t for minors. In fact, there are quite a few perverts taking advantage of the completely anonymous character of the service, as a sample of screenshots on tumblr.com shows.
Aside from such unfortunate encounters, which are a sad reality in cyberspace, there are a lot of “relatively” normal people playing chatroulette as well. Compete.com shows a veritable hockey-stick-effect of pageviews for www.chatroulette.com, currently reaching nearly 1 million unique visitors, while Alexa.com ranks the site among the top1000, traffic-wise.
A quick ad hoc experiment by myself taught me one thing: The whole idea sounds quite fascinating, in theory. But after connecting to my first handful of random strangers, the whole thing started to bore me. And when my next “partner” revealed more than I ever wanted to know, I knew – this was my first and last chat roulette.