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.”
iChatr, a clone of the infamous Chatroulette, has been pulled from the Apple app store. Apparently, Apple isn’t cool with inappropriate use of anonymity and cannot condone the app. → Read More
Chatroulette, the Internet phenomenon that allows users to jump into video chats with random, anonymous strangers (and all too frequently, their genitalia), has launched some new features that give users a bit more control over the kinds of fellow Chatrouletters they’re paired up with.
As first noticed by NewTeeVee, Chatroulette has launched a feature called Localroulette that will use your IP address to direct you to a channel with other users from your region. A second, related feature is Channelroulette, which lets you start or join a channel with a custom title/theme. → Read More
Internet Conga Line is a new take on the ChatRoulette phenomenon. But this time serial UK entrepreneur Alex Tew has approached the issue of how you meet random people on video chat without… hitting the masturbators.
On first viewing it appears there are actually four full video and audio chats going on. Personally I suddenly didn’t feel so trepidatious, as one does with ChatRoulette. As Tew says himself, “it’s a fundamentally different experience to meet people in groups.” → Read More
InternetCongaLine is a new take on the ChatRoulette phenomenon. But this time serial UK entrepreneur Alex Tew has approached the issue of how you meet random people on video chat without… hitting the masturbators.
On first viewing it appears there are actually four full video and audio chats going on. Personally I suddenly didn’t feel so trepidatious, as one does with ChatRoulette. As Tew says himself, “it’s a fundamentally different experience to meet people in groups.” → Read More
Russian website Chatroulette, founded by Andrey Ternovskiy, is perhaps most well known as a place to watch men expose their genitals.
And wow has Ternovskiy been courted by Silicon Valley and other investors. SGN founder Shervin Pishevar helped bring him to Palo Alto and get set up in an apartment. In May the New Yorker talked about how Russia’s DST was having him followed when he first visited the U.S. And we’ve heard rumors of angel investors and venture capitalists circling Ternovskiy like a hawk. → Read More
We’re still here at the first TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Up on stage right now is an interesting group of people discussing how brands can best engage with digital audiences in this day and age.
This is an overview of what Judy Hu, Global Executive Director of Advertising & Branding at GE, Brian Pokorny (CEO of dailybooth), Christopher ‘moot’ Poole of 4chan fame and Andrey Ternovskiy, who started Chatroulette, had to say about that. → Read More
So while the rest of the world was busy making Chatroulette clones, French start-up ToRoulette decided to kick-it up a notch; that’s right, the company decided it was time to develop a professionally-oriented version of Chatroulette destined for Facebook Fan Pages.
Sure, there are already a number of Chatroulette applications hiding out on Facebook, like Chat-o-Rama or what-have-you, that simply leverage users’ personal profiles to create a more secure (aka clothed) environment. Well, ToRoulette goes a little further. The start-up’s platform essentially allows you to integrate Chatroulette into your Fan Page and to organize chat-events with your community of fans. In other words, if successful, ToRoulette believes it should ultimately help to develop a stronger fan base and thus clientele. → Read More
Yes, that’s right – we’re talking about the launch of yet another Chatroulette site. Andrey Turnovisky’s successful idea, which has over 4 million monthly unique visitors, has set off a wave of copycats around the world – with Bazoocam (previously Chatroulettefr.org) and Camtoya amongst the leaders in the French market.
But it gets better. Only 2 months after Bazoocam’s official launch and the team is already announcing a gay version of the site: Camtogays. This new site went live on May 4th and will be monetized with localized, targeted ads in partnership with the dating site Easyflirt. However, the founders and planning to eventually develop and integrate their own dating platform into the site as the traffic picks up. → Read More
The recent chatter about a possible FourHoo / YaSquare deal notwithstanding, there’s another nagging question these days: is foursquare a fun diversion, or could it deeply impact users? How will being Mayor of TechCrunch impact deals local merchants offer me? Or how I talk to friends? Will the marriage of mobile and social Web truly affect where I go, what I buy, who I know, and, uh, everything? Or are we actually moving towards services that embrace randomness, strangers, and the general weirdness of the Internet, after a sunny stay in Facebook-powered friendland? Is the future a walk through a socialized world of augmented reality, or a stranger-fest a-la ChatRoulette? And who’s going to cash out on it? → Read More
Whether it is all the media attention or there are just a lot of lonely people out there with a deep need to talk to strangers, Chatroulette is on a roll. In February, 2010, the young site attracted 3.9 million visitors worldwide, up from 944,000 in January, 2010, according to the latest data from comScore (see chart above). Google Trends for Websites shows a similar growth curve, with about 500,000 unique daily visitors.
The quadrupling of visitors measured by comScore coincided with the relatively new site being discovered by news sites and blogs. It may just indicate the intense level of curiosity about the site, which matches random people together in a simple video chat environment. When you get bored (or creeped out) you can click to start a new session. Or it may be tapping into the basic human need to communicate. It gives “instant communications” a whole new meaning. → Read More
This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, an on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup. His last guest post was an analysis of Twitter user data.
It’s no surprise that Chatroulette is the latest media darling. It has all the elements of a good story: technology, mystery, celebrity, and sex. If you haven’t heard of Chatroulette, this Daily Show segment is a good primer.
We were itching to study Chatroulette in a RJMetrics Dashboard, but no one seemed to have any good data for us to explore. So, we decided compile the data ourselves by leveraging Chatroulette Map, some scrappy programming, and a passionate tech community. We soon had detailed data on 2,883 Chatroulette sessions that tied users to geography, gender, appearance, and more.
Here are a few highlights from our findings: → Read More
If you’ve read about random video chat site Chatroulette lately, you’ll know that it is filled with naked people and journalists. And that’s exactly what The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart found in his exposé of the Web service. In between the random pervs, he actually found more journalists looking for pervs, or something.
The clip has cameos from Katie Couric, Keith Olbermann, and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who insisted he wasn’t cruising or anything. The parody is great linkbait (at least for tech blogs) and pretty funny to boot. It’s clips like these that make Hulu wish Comedy Central didn’t pull its videos and go it alone. → Read More
By now, you’ve probably heard of Chatroulette, the website where one can anonymously have video chat conversations with random strangers from around the world. Needless to say, this freaks out just about everyone who has tried the service so far, which was started by 17-year-old high school student Andrey Ternovskiy from Moscow.
Check out SFWeekly editor Alexia Tsotis’ experience here on TechCrunch, for instance.
It was of course just a matter of time before sites started collecting screencaps from all those mostly NSFW funny, weird, disturbing, [insert appropriate adjective] video chat sessions and turned it into a phenomenon of its own right. One of them, and perhaps the best one around, is Tumblr blog CHATROULOLZ. → Read More
Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers via video chat, has been receiving a lot of buzz. And we’ve seen it can be quite entertaining. Web-based chat startup TinyChat is launching their own version of Chatroulette, called TinyChat Next.
Similar to Chatroulette, you can be thrown into a room with strangers and conduct video chats with random people. When you tire of a person, you can simple move onto the next available user in TinyChat’s “Lobby”. It’s a fairly simple interface and idea, as we’ve seen with Chatroulette. → Read More
SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.
Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show “Next” with vidchat capabilities.
Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit “Next” anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The “Report video as inappropriate” button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn’t provide much of a threat.
I pressed “play” last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on “Next” encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of “camera disabled” chats, two women who automatically clicked “Next” once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese “fan of Google” and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether “I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman” in the hope that I would be the former. → Read More
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