At one point the Chatroulette V.2 anticipation was so thick over at TechCrunch HQ that even we were, how you say, premature. But not as premature as the folks over at Chatroulette themselves, who ominously lured us in yesterday in with, “The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow” and then well, nothing.

The silliest part is that I’ve got some kind of update alarm on Chatroulette, so imagine my excitement when I heard the alarm go off at about 11p.m. “YOUR WEBSITE HAS UPDATED.”

Guess what the update was? Someone changed the word “tomorrow” to “shortly” on the site’s cryptic “Coming Soon!” message. Now I’m not sure whether this means it will be launching in the next 30 minutes or the next three days (I’ve emailed founder Andrey Ternovskiy for an exact ETA), but rest assured, you’ll hear about it here first.

Tweet: TechCrunch’s own Roi Carthy

Crunchbase

• CHATROULETTE!

Company: Chatroulette!

Website: chatroulette.com

Launch Date: February 13, 2012

Chatroulette! is a web site that allows users to connect to and video chat with random (site-chosen) users. It was developed by Andrey Ternovskiy of Moscow. The idea may have been influenced by Omegle, a similar service for text chat only. Chatroulette uses seven high-end servers all located in Frankfurt, Germany. Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second. The application uses Adobe Flash Player, and the RTMFP peer-to-peer technology acquired from Amicima and introduced in Flash Player 10.0. From now on...

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