Its definitely a fun site in the way many sites are 'fun' - However, like 4chan- Turning it into a business is not going to be straight forward as due to the extreme content your only real option is to sell direct ads to the likes of fleshlight and livejasmin.
Im sure there is some options they can explore via filtering ie- " I am a xxx looking to meet with a yyyy near location zzzzz "
Yeah -- I imagine you'd have to be REAL careful about that, though. Many of the types of people you refer to would LOVE to claim to be looking for [non-sexual activity] just for a chance to flash something offensive.
Well, if you spend five minutes on chatroulette you've already seen so much offensive stuff that the next offensive thing you see doesn't really bother you all that much. You just click "next".
Being able to not freak out over someone doing something gross is an absolute necessity to spend any time on chatroulette. And I think this is a good thing, because if nobody gets freaked out anymore, then its no longer fun to freak people out, and — finally — that stuff becomes marginalized.
> Well, if you spend five minutes on chatroulette you've already seen so much offensive stuff that the next offensive thing you see doesn't really bother you all that much. You just click "next".
It might if you specifically clicked "please show me only people interested in chatting and not showing me their dicks."
It's something you do in the dorm to pass the time while you're high or horny. I imagine pairing it up with pizza delivery ads would propel it to a multimillion dollar business (you can't monetize the horniness because horny students don't pay for stuff).
I don't like links to Youtube videos here. At least not without a description of what awaits me. (I should probably have added irony-tags or something to my post above. I wanted to make fun of the videos, not encourage them.)
heres my take: we have millions of people connected to the net. id like to meet new people of similar interests. we should be able to connect them instantly, pushing new people to them. ie- id like to meet new entrepreneurs. introduce me to one new entrepreneur a day.
I've been on Twitter awhile and I haven't had to read anything from big media, celebrities, and social media consultants. Either Ashton Kutcher just doesn't like me, or those problems aren't problems if you're selective about who you follow.
That's a great idea. How do you overcome the social anxiety of getting dropped into a series of essentially on-the-spot interviews? I bet anonymity plays a huge factor in the popularity of the site, but that can't work (at least not in the same way) for what you're talking about.
i wouldnt do it via webcam, thats just a big barrier to entry.
im thinking of doing it as an experiment here. hiten shah said something to me like: i try to meet one new entrepreneur a day. that struck me. imagine if you met one new fellow entrepreneur a day? so heres the experiment:
sign up for a list: first name, last name, email address (required). optional- twitter, facebook, blog links for context. connect each person on the list to a new entrepreneur a day.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd actually prefer face to face (ish, via webcam). I started brainstorming my blog posts via video and I find it much easier to express myself when I can talk through it verbally and visually. When I write I focus too much on how I'm saying things (structure, form, etc), and I find it difficult to focus on what I'm saying.
It might not be pornography, but it's definitely pornographic (in the same way that extreme violence and such can be pornographic.) You're not there for any sort of self-actualization; you're there, much like a circus, because it's a strange sensory experience.
If they capture every video stream that goes through their servers they must have a TON of raw footage, I'm sure some of it could be spliced together/sold/subscribed to/whatever.
Not a pretty business model (at least, I'm assuming there's a low pretty-to-ugly ratio on Chatroulette :-) but probably a functional one.
That poses a rather large privacy problem. If word gets out that every stream on the site is being recorded, people will feel much less secure in their anonymity on the site and will probably stop doing interesting things with it. This will be even worse if Chatroulette starts publishing streams.
"Everything supplied by the user you are connected with is not property of Chatroulette, and therefore Chatroulette is not responsible for what you will find."
"how did it take 15 years for the Internet to deliver this experience?"
It's simple: nobody did it before because it obviously doesn't work, AND there's a related model that does work and pays.
Go to chatroulette. There are about 20 blokes for every woman. Most of these guys are looking to talk and have (some kind of) sex with women. The rest are probably trying to talk and have sex with other guys.
The way to fix that is to charge the guys and pay the girls, and needless to say that's a successful business model though perhaps a bit saturated by now.
I just found out about it tonight, but it reminds me of all the problems and all the benefits of Craigslist (and really connecting with other people for example). Unlike the broadcast, asynchronous mediums of YouTube, etc. , this site seems directly made so we can connect with a a real person and be entertained (in the broadest sense). The anonymity allows people to do things that they wouldn't normally do when connected to their identity (allows cool performance art too).
You'll notice that a lot of folks like to visit chartroulette together with friends because it's like going out. Being able to tell somebody... "crazy night, we saw... and...."
The internet is supposed to be our window into another world right? I guess this is the first real start of that. And... maybe, just maybe, we'll be entertained by someone like us (or shocked by a fat guy in a bra).
This is what Facebook would be if instead of having friends, every day you were thrown in with a group of 100 strangers and there was a video feed. Some people (especially men) act strange when they are in front of a bunch of strangers for a short period of time, with little chance of meeting them later.
> Some people (especially men) act strange when they are in front of a bunch of strangers for a short period of time, with little chance of meeting them later.
I would turn that around—some animals act strange when they know they'll have to deal with the same strangers later. This strange behavior is called "society"; it is a tenuous and fragile phenomenon.
So the real question is if someone can build something like this that connects perfect strangers via video/audio so easily through their browsers on any operating system that supports flash/webcam/mic, why can't I pull up a page, enter someone's email address, and drop into a chat just like chatroulette with the person I'm looking for without having to install anything extra?
I know gmail has audio/video support (and has for a while), but it uses a special plugin and doesn't support linux, which I guess is fine (although annoying), but why should I have to install your special plugin if I've got flash installed and Chatroulette can do it?
I remember as soon as P2P chat came out on the net, I was using the random chat function. It's just a fun thing to do every now and then. You meet all sorts of people.
Its definitely a fun site in the way many sites are 'fun' - However, like 4chan- Turning it into a business is not going to be straight forward as due to the extreme content your only real option is to sell direct ads to the likes of fleshlight and livejasmin.
Im sure there is some options they can explore via filtering ie- " I am a xxx looking to meet with a yyyy near location zzzzz "