Chatroulette
Chatroulette is a video-conferencing website that spontaneously connects strangers from around the globe using web cameras and chat rooms. The site pairs users randomly, and they can keep clicking "next" to shuffle through different users until they are satisfied with their pairing. This is called being "nexted."
History
The website was first launched on November 2009 by a 17 year old student in high school in Moscow, Russia named Andrey Ternovsky.[1] The source of his idea for Chatroulette came from the various video chats he had with his friends on the Skype platform. The name was picked after Ternovsky watched the "The Deer Hunter," a film that depicted prisoners of war being forced to play the game "Russian roulette."[2] When the site first launched in November 2009, it registered approximately 500 visitors per day.[3] One month later, this number jumped to 50,000. [4] By the beginning of March, Chatroulette boasted a user-base of approximately 1.5 million users.[5] 33% of them were from the United States and 5% from Germany.[6] Ternovsky ran the site from his bedroom, working alongside four programmers who were working virually. The site's main source of income came through advertising links to a online dating service. [7]
Demographics
Media appearances
- The New York Times
- The New Yorker
- New York magazine
- Good Morning America
- Newsnight
- Tosh.0
- The Daily Show with Job Stewart
Criticism
References
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatroulette
- http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/17-year-old-chatroulette-founder-mom-dad-the-site-is-expanding-a-681817.html
- http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/one-on-one-andrey-ternovskiy-creator-of-chatroulette/
