Chatroulette

Chatroulette

URL	Chatroulette.com
Slogan	Welcome to the world of Chatroulette!
Type of site	Instant messaging, video chat, stranger chat
Owner	Andrey Ternovskiy
Created by	Andrey Ternovskiy
Launched	November 2009
Alexa rank	4,846 (November 2011[update])[1]
Revenue	Advertising

Chatroulette is a website that pairs strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor who is chosen at random. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

Overview

The Chatroulette web site was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia.^[2] Ternovskiy says the concept arose from video chats he used to have with friends on Skype, and that he wrote the first version of Chatroulette in "two days and two nights".^[3] Ternovskiy chose the name "Chatroulette" after watching The Deer Hunter, a 1978 film set in the Vietnam War in which prisoners of war are forced to play Russian roulette.^[4]

In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day.^[3] One month later there were 50,000.^[3] The site has been featured in The New York Times, ^[2] The New Yorker,^[5] New York magazine,^[6] and on Good Morning America,^[7] Newsnight in the United Kingdom,^[8] Tosh.0,^[9] and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.^[10] In February 2010, there were about 35,000 people on Chatroulette at any given time.^[11] Around the beginning of March, Ternovskiy estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users, approximately 33% of them from the United States and 5% from Germany.^[3]

An early growth phase was funded by a $10,000 investment from Ternovskiy's parents which he soon paid back.^[3] As of March 2010^[update], Ternovskiy was running the site from his childhood bedroom, assisted by four programmers who were working remotely, and the site was supported through advertising links to an online dating service.^[3]

According to one informal study published in March 2010, nearly half of all Chatroulette spins connected a user with someone in the USA, while the next most likely country was France with 15%. On average in sessions showing a single person, 89% of these were male and 11% were female. 8% of spins showed multiple people behind the camera. 1 in 3 females appeared as such a group. That number is 1 in 12 for males. A user was more likely to encounter a webcam featuring no person at all than one featuring a sole female. 1 in 8 spins yielded possibly objectionable content. A user was twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than to encounter actual female nudity.^[12]

The website uses Adobe Flash to display video and access the user's webcam. Flash's peer-to-peer network capabilities (via RTMFP) allow almost all video and audio streams to travel directly between user computers, without using server bandwidth. However, certain combinations of routers will not allow UDP traffic to flow between them, and then it is necessary to fall back to RTMP.^[13]

Culture

A participant whose chat partner clicks the Chatroulette Next button to move on to a new partner is described as being "nexted".^[14]

Celebrities claiming to have used Chatroulette include Kelly Osbourne, Drake, Daniel Tosh, Neal Boortz, Joel Madden, Nicole Richie, Jessica Alba, Kevin Smith,^[15] Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Brown,Justin Bieber, Professor Green and Olly Murs.^[16][17]

On February 27, 2010 at the Soundwave Festival in Melbourne, Australia, Faith No More streamed their festival performance live on Chatroulette.^[18]

Niche sites with functionality imitating Chatroulette have been growing in number, although none have yet gained its popularity and notoriety.^[19]

Chatroulette was parodied in the South Park season 14 episode "You Have 0 Friends".^[20]

An NCIS TV episode (Season 7, Episode 22: Borderland) featured a comedy relief section where character Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) was continually 'next-ed' by the chatroulette community. It was later revealed that Timothy McGee (Sean Murray) had rigged his computer to disconnect each chat after a few seconds.

Professor Green's song: "Kids That Love To Dance" (ft. Emeli Sandé) also makes use of a Chatroulette-style program.

The second episode of CSI: NY that aired on October 1, 2010 featured a Chatroulette-like program on which one of the lab techs witnesses a woman murdered right in front of him.^[21]

Controversial content

Alert message shown after the user has been reported 3 times

According to a survey carried out by RJMetrics, approximately 1 in 8 of feeds from Chatroulette involved 'R-rated' content.^[12] Parody shows such as The Daily Show and South Park have lampooned this aspect of the service and nudity has become an established part of the site's notoriety.^[22]

In response, the website has encouraged users to be at least 18 years old, and prohibits pornographic behavior. Users who experience harassment or witness illegal, immoral, or pornographic activity may report the offending user. After three users have complained about the same participant within 5 minutes the user is banned from the service^[3] for 10–40 minutes.

As of mid-2011, bans have been increased to 24 hours but no longer requires user feedback since the reporting button has been removed from the UI.

The website's users who are banned are now punished by redirecting them to an adult chatroulette or you can do "community service" where you scroll through screenshots and mark ones that violate the terms of the site.

See also

• Omegle
• Text roulette

References

1. ^ "Chatroulette.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/Chatroulette.com. Retrieved 2011-11-02. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Stone, Brad (2010-02-13). "Chatroulette’s Creator, 17, Introduces Himself - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com". Bits.blogs.nytimes.com. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-founder-17-introduces-himself/. Retrieved 2010-02-28. 
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Yevgeny Kondakov and Benjamin Bidder: 17-Year-Old Chatroulette Founder: 'Mom, Dad, the Site Is Expanding' Interview with Andrey Ternovskiy, Der Spiegel, 5 March 2010
4. ^ Nick Bilton: One on One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of Chatroulette (interview) Bits Blog, The New York Times online, March 12, 2010
5. ^ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/17/100517fa_fact_ioffe?currentPage=all>
6. ^ Anderson, Sam (2010-02-05). "Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? - New York Magazine". Nymag.com. http://nymag.com/news/media/63663/. Retrieved 2010-02-28. 
7. ^ "Chatroulette: Talking to Strangers on Internet - ABC News". Abcnews.go.com. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/chatroulette-talking-strangers-internet/story?id=9822879. Retrieved 2010-02-28. 
8. ^ "Newsnight: From the web team: Tuesday 9 March 2010". BBC. 2010-03-09. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/fromthewebteam/2010/03/tuesday_9_march_2010.html. Retrieved 2010-05-14. 
9. ^ "Chat Roulette | Tosh.0". Comedy Central. http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=266258&title=chat-roulette. Retrieved 2010-05-14. 
10. ^ "Tech-Talch - Jon encounters several reporters and naked masturbating men as he explores Chatroulette". www.thedailyshow.com/. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-4-2010/tech-talch---chatroulette. Retrieved 2010-03-05. 
11. ^ John D. Sutter, CNN (2010-02-24). "Chatroulette offers random webcam titillation - CNN.com". Edition.cnn.com. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/22/chatroulette.random.chat/index.html?hpt=C1. Retrieved 2010-02-28. 
12. ^ ^{a b} Moore, Robert J. (2010-03-16). "Chatroulette Is 89 Percent Male, 47 Percent American, And 13 Percent Perverts". TechCrunch. http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-stats-male-perverts/. Retrieved 2010-05-14. 
13. ^ "Stratus Discussion Group". 2010-04-08. http://forums.adobe.com/message/1064983#1064983. Retrieved 2010-04-08. 
14. ^ Bunz, Mercedes (2010-03-08). "Chatroulette: 71% men, 15% women and 14% perverts". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/mar/08/chatroulette. Retrieved 2010-03-09. 
15. ^ Blowhard (08 September 2010). "Kevin Smith Uses Chatroulette: Blowhard episode 4". www.smodcast.com. http://smodcast.com/blowhard/index.html. Retrieved 09 September 2010. 
16. ^ "10 Celebs you may chance upon on Chatroulette". 2010-03-03. http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-10-celebs-you-may-chance-upon-on-chatroulette/. Retrieved 2010-03-08. 
17. ^ "Twitter is so 2009. Celebs discover scary new online social site, Chat Roulette". Fox News. 2010-02-25. http://entertainment.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/02/25/chat-roulette-twitter-ashton-kutcher-chris-brown/. Retrieved 2010-03-09. 
18. ^ "Faith No More stream entire show to Chatroulette". iTWire. 2010-02-27. http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/home-it/37217-faith-no-more-stream-entire-show-to-chatroulette. Retrieved 2010-05-14. 
19. ^ "Chatroulette Clones: A New Market for Random Connections". readwriteweb.com. 2010-02-26. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_chatroulette_clones_how_the_viral_hit_is_creating_a_market_of_clones.php. Retrieved 2010-03-08. 
20. ^ "Looking for Quality Friends". South Park Studios. http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/269234/?searchterm=You+have+0+Friends. Retrieved 2010-04-08. 
21. ^ "Unfriendly Chat". http://www.tv.com/csi-ny/unfriendly-chat/episode/1351998/recap.html?tag=episode_recap;recap. 
22. ^ South Park Takes on Tron, Facebook, and Chat Roulette from MovieViral.com

External links

• Chatroulette.com (official website)
• Bits Blog: Chatroulette’s Creator, 17, Introduces Himself from The New York Times (February 13, 2010)
• Barnett about CR from CNN
• Robert J Moore (March 16, 2010), Chatroulette Is 89 Percent Male, 47 Percent American, And 13 Percent Perverts, http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-stats-male-perverts 
• Profile of Andrey Ternovskiy in The New Yorker
• Aleexe.com (copy website)