Yes, everyone is doing it. Or talking about it. Well, hopefully not middle aged white america just yet. Anyway, in my sudden loneliness after my wife left from her visit, I figured I may as well try it. Once over the initial fear of running into someone I know in some stage of undress, I fired up www.chatroulette.com.
Intentionally, I hadn’t read any background on it before. Sadly, I quickly realized it was not the dream world of talking to someone in some wondrous and interesting part of the world about what they think about the African Swallow or whether Obama should have hit Netenyahu with his shoes– no no, it is, for the most part, the worst the internet has to offer: penises of old men. If you’re going to bare your entire body to the world in front of a camera, at least go and work out, man!! Sigh. It could have been so good. It really gets boring quickly as person after person “next”s you; and echoing the thoughts of Casey Neistat, I funnily found myself being relieved when men got rid of me within the first 2 seconds, but hurt when it was pretty women! I also found it funny that out of only 3 conversations, two people I spoke to had their videos blanked out. When I went looking online for some explanations, I found this fantastic video:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9669721&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
(chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo)
I knew people had to do had to be better than what I’ve found, and surely I found this list of 24 Best Chatroulette Characters that have been spotted on Chatroulette. And 30 more (scroll down to “Is This a Sign?”) Sure enough, some celebrities do show up as well. And I don’t know how much luck they’ll have, but police are taking notice as well, and will hopefully find some of the idiots that are on there for real mischief.
Meanwhile, I came across this hillarious article on the 10 People You (Don’t Want to) Meet on Chatroulette. Of course, any of these characters are more likely to be happened upon than the aforementioned celebrities! Hopefully, you are REALLY lucky, and come across this brilliant piano-player that will sing to you instead!
Cheers,
-r-
Update 1: Speaking of roulette, Mark posted this today: “I see dumb people.”
Update 2: Ran into this Techchrunch’s writeup on Chatroulette today, where they did some fun statistical analysis, and found a site that mapped chats called Chatroulette Map