What to make of chatroulette?
avc.com
avc.com
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 "
That feature of course being, impromptu and anonymous introductions.
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.
It might if you specifically clicked "please show me only people interested in chatting and not showing me their dicks."
Much more excited about that.
(NSFW)
I wonder if there is a way around that.
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.
In my first 5 screens, 2 guys had their junk out (one guy was servicing himself) and a 3rd held a sign that read "Show Your Tits" ...
I guess it's not porn in the traditional sense, but still ... it's obvious what people are using it for.
BTW, wouldn't it be easy for Skype to add a feature like this?
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.
"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."
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.
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).
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.
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?
Mark
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.
I think this app has a lot of potential.