Uptown Magazine - February 18/10
Chatroulette.com
This past December, the newest Internet phenomenon was quietly born. Embracing the anything-goes Wild West days of the early Internet, ChatRoulette allows users with a web cam to instantly connect face-to-face with random strangers around the world.
“Our most popular new online tools - Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg - were designed to help us tame the web’s wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies,” wrote Sam Anderson in a recent article for New York Magazine. “ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It’s the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.”
During December, only about 300 people were using the service; as of this month, that number has grown to over 10,000 with no signs of slowing down.
The site’s popularity is driven by the fact you never know who you are going to be connected with. It also plays off our society’s voyeuristic instincts. The interactions can be as brief or as long as you decide. Don’t like who (or what) you see? Click next and see who pops up. From the bored housewife tired of surfing food blogs to the college kids drinking in their dorm to the net addict who is always at his or her computer to the fat guy jacking off, ChatRoulette is not for the faint of heart.
Some of the interactions on ChatRoulette are driven by sex (just like Craigslist or any old-fashioned chat room out there), but that doesn’t mean the site should be totally written off.
“Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way - your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation. Eventually, I realized that clicking ‘next’ was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible,” Anderson wrote.
Although the sheer simplicity and utter randomness is what makes ChatRoulette appealing to people, it could be taken in a different direction. With a couple of small changes, you can see the potential of fine-tuning the idea by allowing users to filter connections by different criteria but, then again, that might change the entire spirit of the the site.
Quick Hits
MP3 of the Week: Radiohead: Live in Los Angeles
High-quality 29-song Radiohead bootleg recorded at a concert for Haiti in Los Angeles.
Video of the Week: Roadkill
Classic snowboarding film from 1993, directed by Dave Seoane and featuring Jamie Lynn, Shaun Palmer, Terje Haakonsen, John Cardiel, Bryan Iguchi and others. Who needs the Olympics? This is what snowboarding is really about.
