ChatRoulette

I have recently heard about ChatRoulette, a new website that randomly pair strangers from all around the world for a chat conversation (video and text). It works like this: you just go to the site (www.chatroulette.com) with your webcam-equipped computer and find yourself connected face to face with a total stranger somewhere else in the world. You can either start a chat conversation or, if you don’t like the person you are connected to, you can easily click on “next” or “F9” and you will face another person. In YouTube I have found an interesting video that shows how this new social medium works (video).

The creator of ChatRoulette is Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17 years old Russian student with a passion for internet and coding (interview by the New York Times). He said that it developed the project for fun with no business goals, just to be randomly connected with different people all around the world. He didn’t expect such a great success: the web site had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of last February without any adverting campaign. It has already generated a great international press coverage: from the New York Times “The human shuffle” and “Hello, Stranger: The Ups and Downs of Chatroulette” to ABC news “Talking to strangers with Chatroulette” to all the main European newspapers and magazines. In the digital world, the blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its preferred site since YouTube and The Frisky, named it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.”

ChatRoulette, like other social media, has already invented new expressions to add to our “web vocabulary” like “to be nexted” with the meaning of “to be discarded, denied” and it happens “when a random stranger clicks the next button immediately after seeing what you look like” in a social media.

In my opinion Chatroulette will grow more and more. It doesn’t really use new tools as we already know Skype or Window Messenger (for chat conversations) and the graphic of the website is very easy and definitely not appealing (Mr. Ternovskiy said that he wants to keep everything minimalistic, even the advertising on the website). The great idea is, instead, that it creates “a digital blind date” with a stranger from all around the world, you can talk to somebody that probably you wouldn’t have ever met. It exploits feelings typical of the blind date like the curiosity and the excitement of grabbing the attention of a stranger, but this time you are safe, often at home, and if you don’t like the person you can easily change the connected partner.

Whenever we have a new social media everybody wants to try it with many different purposes: just for fun, for curiosity, for showing off or even “dating”. It is a new experience that at the beginning is quite addictive and you can even get obsessed. The inventor said that most of users are from the United States, but I guess it will be accessed from more and more countries in few months.

In the long run, however, I think people will get tired of it as you can’t really establish new relationships, find friends or have a conversation (many people just have a quick look at you); after a while you are bored of nexting others or being nexted. Let’s travel and meet real people!!!