Jayplay says: Check out Chatroulette

Thursday, March 4, 2010

You win some, you lose some.

The same life mantra can applied in the gambling game of Chatroulette — a virtual conversation with a complete stranger. I had only heard rumors of the website from friends, (one of whom chatted up John Mayer) and decided to brave the odds and stare the webcam in the face.

Chatroulette.com was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Russian high school student. He says he created the site for fun, and had no intention of making a profit. The site now gets more than 20,000 unique visitors a day.

Photo by Kayla Regan

This web producer decided to give Chatroulette a little try for herself. She had mixed reactions...

Chatroulette’s display features two stacked video screens with room for a chat conversation on the right. Providing that both the camera and microphone are enabled, you can literally have a face-to-face conversation with a randomly generated stranger. My first luck of the draw was a guy with a Scream mask wearing a Viking hat.

The bad thing about Chatroulette? A perfectly good idea gets abused by perverts who think seeing reactions to nudity and other obscene images onscreen is hilarious. For the sake of Jayplay, I continued on.

You can disconnect from your partner by promptly hitting “next,” or wait to be “next-ed” yourself. I tended to take this personally.

Next, I ran into a few guys from France mixing their own music at 2 a.m., who admitted that they were, in fact, normal. Also included in the normal category, after perusing quickly through too many penises, was Jake, a University of Pittsburgh student Chatroulette-ing at work. He worked for a company called Telefact — a sort of KU Info, randomly answering the phone while we chatted. He says it’s a great way to pass the time when being on a computer for hours.

If you can look past the creepers and potential predators on Chatroulette, it really is a great and entertaining invention. I got to talk to people across the country and at different colleges. One DJ from West Hollywood told me he found Chatroulette addictive, saying he could talk to people all over the world as if they were his closest friends. I did, in fact, keep wanting to press the “next” button, curious to see who else was out there.

True to the style and setup of the site, not all of the strangers are “winners.” Place your bets carefully.

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