You Asked It! Turns Twitter Into Chatroulette, But Without The Nudity

@yoda / 1:52 pm PST • November 20, 2012

I use Twitter a lot, as I’ve been reminded in the past by folks like my boss at TechCrunch. It’s cool though. It’s kind of my job to keep up with the latest trends and what-have-you. Twitter is a great place for that. I don’t watch everything that happens in my stream, but certain things pop out at me, such as when someone asks a question.

A cool site called “You Asked It” turns Twitter into Chatroulette, but without all of that nudity stuff. And video. Let me explain. Basically, the site pulls in tweets that have a question mark (?), figuring that the person tweeting it is indeed asking a question. A random tweet question pops up and you have a few seconds to answer it. The tweet goes back to that person and boom, you’re now connected to someone that you wouldn’t have ever met before.

This is the type of cool discovery and originality that I hope Twitter supports moving forward. I hope it sticks around. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the better uses of Twitter’s API that I’ve seen in a few years.

You can put in a search term to get specific types of questions to pop up. Like, baseball, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Interestingly, before I saw this come into our tips line, I witnessed what I thought to be the oddest, yet coolest, connection ever made on Twitter:

In a way, this is a bat signal for Twitter users, some asking real questions, some wondering out loud. It’s random and something you have to try out. It’s like a real-time, human-powered search engine. For those who complain about Twitter’s onboarding process and getting new users to tweet, this is a pretty damn good way to do it.

Sure, You Asked It! isn’t a startup with any business models, but it’s a fun project by Maarten Schenk, and I take my hat off to him. Try the site out, have a play, answer some questions and use Twitter to make new friends and continue the conversation on Twitter itself. See? Twitter is also also great for that. Ahhh, serendipity.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

You Asked It! Turns Twitter Into Chatroulette, But Without The Nudity

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