 "Photo: Angelica Davalos")
It’s a Sunday night and you’re done with all of your homework. You’ve had enough of what Facebook has to offer. But you still find yourself surfing the web, looking for something to entertain yourself.
A new website called Chatroulette just might quench your curiosity.
When I first heard about this website, I was hesitant to try it out. Chatroulette is a webcam to webcam website, but the fun is, you don’t know who you will get connected to.
It was invented by 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy, a high school student from Moscow, Russia.
The first thing to do when visiting the site is to set up your webcam. Make sure your microphone is working because the person on the other end is likely to talk to you longer if he or she can hear you, even though there is a chat box.
Next, click “New game,” and the fun begins. You are immediately connected to another random user webcam to webcam.
The first person I “met” on Chatroulette was a faceless guitarist trying his best to play a song, even though he wasn’t that good. This first time, I nexted him.
Nexting someone means you have clicked on the “Next” button at the top of the page. This disconnects you from the current user you are talking to and connects you with someone else. Sometimes you are the one getting nexted. Try not to take it personally.
One of the first normal people I met on Chatroulette was a girl named Candice, who is a teacher in the state of Minnesota. We discussed Chatroulette and the variety and copious amounts of nudity on the site as the only inhibitor to the fun.
You won’t always meet normal people on Chatroulette. There is a fair number of perverts who feel the best way to meet new people online is to start the conversation in the nude. I won’t get too explicit, but the number of naked men is much greater than the number of clothed people.
Then there are those random users who hold signs that demand other users anything from showing their cleavage to dancing. One of the best examples of this encounter was a user who held up a sign that said, “Show me your Golden Globes, and I’ll show you my Oscar.”
One of the more interesting people I met was a man who claimed to be a butler for one of the world’s biggest celebrities, which he could not name. He said he was in St. Barts, an island in the Caribbean, with his famous employer. But of course, Chatroulette allows you to be anyone you want to be.
A survey from the Web Ecology Project found that 87 percent of Chatroulette users are men, and 13 percent are women. The same study found that a majority of users are between the ages of 18 to 24.
So why the sudden popularity in random online social encounters? It harkens back to the early days of the internet when chat rooms were popular.
After 2000, the internet was used as a better way to communicate with the people we know in our real lives. This brought innovations in social networking with websites like MySpace and Facebook. Now it feels the internet has taken a 360 degree turn and is back to its roots.
Talking to someone you don’t know at all feels thrilling since you can be as honest or as deceitful as you want. People on the internet love putting themselves out there. And for the most, besides showing someone from across the world your face, on Chatroulettte, they will never know who you really are, unless you want them to.
For more information, visit this website at www.chatroulette.com.
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