Chatroulette is plotting another comeback!
The Russian website that allows complete strangers to jump from one awkward random video chat to the next was all the rage among the Web’s tastemakers in the first half of last year, but it seems like everyone’s now pretty much moved on. The fact that the site was – and is still – frequently used by creeps who couldn’t seem to keep their pants on didn’t help much in that regard.
Anyway, Chatroulette is still around, and despite the existence of sites like YouTube, VEVO and direct competitors such as Tinychat, they claim to be the ‘largest video social network’ in the world, attracting more than 20 million visitors per month. → Read More
At the end of last year, social networking site myYearbook shifted its focus more towards games and introduced a live video chat feature which could have completely backfired. But instead of turning into the next Chatroulette, the site has managed to keep the unwanted live porn vids to a minimum. While Chatroulette still has an estimated nudity rate of 1 in 50 videos, myYTearbook was able to cut its nudity rate down to 1 in a 1,000. In a Q&A with myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook, he explains the strategies he used to get there.
Q: When you decided to add live video chat to your site, what were you thinking? I mean, seriously, what were you thinking?
When we decided to build a Live Video gaming platform, the best example of Live Video at scale was Chatroulette, and it was full of porn. At the time, 1 out of every 10 video streams on Chatroulette was obscene.
Chatroulette was growing in part because it was obscene—it was the accident victim and the public was the rubbernecker. Chatroulette’s traffic peaked in March 2010—the same month that Jon Stewart screamed into the camera “I hate Chatroulette!” to end a segment that would be the service’s high water mark. → Read More
Note to startups: Don’t publish your lawyer’s notes about the various ways you may or may not profit off of user data.
Video chat site Chatroulette seems to have just done just that with its privacy policy, publishing lawyer’s notes like …
“[Andrey, does Chatroulette intend to share the personally identifiable information of users with third party companies for them to send direct marketing or promotional materials to your users e.g. name, email address, postal address etc.? If not, please delete this Section 5.]“
For the small percentage of our readers who do not enjoy a random penis sighting, comes Pick or Skip, a cleaned-up version of Chatroulette.
The idea behind the new site was to build a safe and more structured experience on top of the random connection/conversation aspect that made Chatroulette such a craze last year. → Read More
Many a video application maker claims to have built a ‘Chatroulette for Facebook’, meaning an app that enables random video-chat connections between Facebook users in real-time. Rounds.com also has such an app, but offers a bit more than just video-based meetings between random people.
Already at 335,000 monthly active users and counting, Rounds’ Facebook app now boasts a ‘Random Rounds’ feature that lets people interact with strangers, but also play games and share photos, among other activities. → Read More
Forgotten for months after an extended period of downtime did not result in any noticeable improvement, everyone’s favorite video chat site, Chatroulette has come up with the following solution to its problem of declining usership: Skins!
After following a cryptic tweet from the Chatroulette Twitter account (“chatroulette is back ! a new face chatroulette.com”) down a rabbit hole, I discovered that you can now change your background on Chatroulette while you chat. In my brief foray, I’ve seen everything from Greek mythology-theme to rainbow hyper-color to sunburst to paisley to the hot pink we’ve got going on above. → Read More
It’s now nearly the end of the year, and you know what that means: end-of-the-year lists. Apple has just released a bunch, and now Google has too. As they do every year, Google has unveiled their “Zeitgeist 2010“. And they have some nifty interactive data visualizations once again — and now they’re in HTML5.
Google singles out the Olympics, the World Cup, earthquakes, the oil spill, and Lady Gaga among others in their post on the matter. But their charts focus mainly on the fastest-rising queries. Of note in the top queries, the top iPhone (iPhone 4) beat the top Android phone (Evo 4G), Twitter beat Facebook, and Chatroulette beat everyone. In fact, the service (which no one seems to talk about anymore) was far ahead of every other fast-rising query expect for the iPad, which was a close second. → Read More
In general, the key driver of social networking so far is games on Facebook. But most of those games aren’t social in the way that playing Monopoly or cards with your friends and family over the holidays is social. MyYearbook, which is a small but profitable social network focussing on younger teenage users, is going to try to make online games more social by getting its members to play together at the same time. The site has 4.7 million active visitors a month generating nearly 1 billion pageviews. It has about 1 million active users every day who spend a third of their time playing games and using other apps. The company makes its money from virtual currency and in-game offers, and is on track to make about $22 million in revenues this year, according to CEO Geoff Cook
In mid-December, myYearbook will launch a new set of a dozen live games which will combine casual games with live video chat. These are basic games like Warship, Gin Rummy, Chess, Checkers, line of Four, and Tic Tac Toe. MyYearbook is also partnering OMGPOP (which specializes in live online games), Heyzap, and Viximo to bring some of their games into myYearbook with a live video component. These aren’t amazing games. That is not what they are about. They are designed to get people to interact with one another, to make new friends or to flirt. They are games everybody knows and everybody can play. → Read More
Internet phenomenon Merton, who forged his career playing piano for strangers on Charoulette, took the stage at the NewTeeVee conference today to talk about the profound effect of online video on his life.
Along with revealing that he is now committed to his infamous hoodie and glasses disguise because Internet fame has turned him into a public figure, Merton lamented the decline of the service and its potential for musicians, “I’m very surprised Chatroulette never caught on for other artists.” → Read More
If Google Street View and Chatroulette mated and gave birth to a lovechild, it’d look a lot like MapCrunch. For the record, this is not a TechCrunch network site, and would have probably been better off with a name like MapRoulette or StreetviewRoulette or something.
Either way, if you want to be taken to a random location on Google Street View (in North America, Europe, Asia or Australasia), either by clicking a button or automagically after a couple of seconds, MapCrunch is the mash-up place to be. → Read More
vChatter, a popular video chat application on Facebook, is taking on Chatroulette today, launching a “family-friendly” video chat standalone site. vChatter, which attracts 2.5 million active monthly users on Facebook, has been able to filter out the Chatroulette penis problem, because account activity is tied to the user’s Facebook identity . And the vChatter consistently checks screenshots of chats taking place to make sure users aren’t exposing themselves or conducting inappropriate behavior.
The new destination site brings social video chat outside the walls of Facebook. The service, which requires you to sign in with your Facebook credentials, allows users to pick who they want to meet based on geography, gender, and age. By factoring demographic data into the equation, vChatter claims to actually be able to create valuable matches of users for video-chat. And Similar to Chatroulette, you can click “next” to move on to another video chat. → Read More
At the risk of flogging a dead horse: Chatroulette is currently down. Again? Yes, again.
This time, no promises of an updated and redesigned version launching ‘tomorrow’ or ‘shortly’. If you’re lucky enough to even get the website address to resolve, you’ll be looking at a nice ’403 – Forbidden’ or ’500 Internal Server Error’ page, or some freaky nginx Web server landing page. → Read More
The transformation is now complete. Our favorite random video chat site Chatroulette has gone through a redesign over the past week and is now back up, in what founder Andrei Ternovskiy and those who believe in second chances hope will be a more nudity-free i.e. more monetizable version.
The “renewed and updated” Chatroulette is reportedly one of many recent efforts at shaking the Chatroulette penis stigma and hopefully improving the site’s advertising and investment prospects. → Read More
So I’ve been waiting for the new Chatroulette to go up for three days now and no dice. In the meantime I’ve been getting a slew of emails and tweets from people trying to get me to switch over to their to their random “chat with strangers” services (Hi Omegle!). However none have been particularly compelling, UNTIL NOW.
We’ve been running in stealth for the past few months, as we’ve negotiated deals and developed software (that’s done), but it seems you’ve broken the seal on the jar of kind bud, so we’re announcing on TechCrunch … → Read More
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. → Read More
You probably haven’t noticed (unless you’ve been reading TechCrunch), but Chatroulette is down. A message on the live, random video chat site says that “experiment #1 is over now” and that a completely new version of the site will launch later today.
Chatroulette took the world by storm in the beginning of the year, showing amazing viral growth as the communications service took off. But quickly it was overrun by pervs, and it’s traffic went limp. And now the sense even among Chatroulette’s early supporters is that it blew its early opportunity. Many of those who embraced Ternovskiy early have already written him off. → Read More
Chatroulette, the service that lets strangers meet over video, has been taken down. A message reads “The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow.”
We’ve also heard, but haven’t confirmed, that Napster founder Shawn Fanning has broken ties with the company and is no longer advising founder Andrey Ternovskiy. → Read More
Remember the Blair Witch Project? With its campaign for The Last Exorcism, Lionsgate Films has taken the amateur video horror film idea to the next level, proving that there’s a way to use Chatroulette as more than just a medium where you can see strangers get naked and watch Ben Fold’s covers.
The ad (which has received 339, 743 views thus far), cleverly spoofs Chatroulette’s propensity for nudity, luring unsuspecting viewers in with the temptation of a cute girl about to take off her clothes.
Once again, it seems as though the horror genre is light years ahead of the Hollywood curve when it comes to grassroots viral marketing and you know, using the Internet. The tactic seems to be working, as IMDB’s Movie Meter is plotting a 23% rise in the film’s popularity in the past week, caused by links on sites like Gizmodo and this one. → Read More
Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA host David Kirkpatrick sat down with Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker to talk about what comes after the social revolution. Both Parker and Hoffman made it clear that they don’t think social is going anywhere anytime soon. So Kirkpatrick asked what the most interesting social opportunity is that Facebook isn’t directly involved in?
Hoffman said that his answer was gaming, and that’s why he invested in Zynga. But going forward, he wasn’t sure yet. But Parker gave a more foward-looking answer. “I think the move to live is pretty interesting. No one has nailed live,” he said. → Read More
Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy recently posted this strange missive detailing Chatroulette’s commitment to cleaning up its act. In battling the porn plague, Ternovskiy has resorted to tracking offending IP addresses and turning them into the police, among other things (I’m assuming the hilariously named “penis recognition software” wasn’t enough):
“While many people understood the concept of roulette, where sometimes you can lose the game – due to randomness, over time it became a major bottleneck in further development of the service, because of a certain difficulties with raising venture capital, legally operating on the United States territory and having to deal with negative feedback.”
