Why is ChatRoulette so Popular?
Anyone who has been online for long enough can remember the early days of the Web. The days of plain text HTML web pages, dial-up, the recently deceased Geocities, and meeting random people in chat rooms. There was no social networking like Facebook & Twitter! You got to talk to whoever else joined chat with you and only a rare few had voice or even video.
These days you meet somebody new in the real world and the first thing they want to know is “Can I add you on Facebook?” or “What’s your Twitter name?”. People you never wanted to see again from high school can find you online after all these years and pick up where they left off – picking on you! Or not… maybe they are good friends and you laugh about them getting paper cuts while opening a bag of cookies.
So what’s so cool about this new-fangled ChatRoulette? It’s old school, baby! Kids these days never knew what it was like to experience the web so randomly. These days when the search engine is king and you can be sent directly to the content you want, you hardly ever find yourself just wandering the vast unknown of the Web. ChatRoulette brings that randomness back with a little bit of anonymity – yes you can see the person’s webcam, but don’t see a username, no address, no contact info!
So I say Happy Random Chatting to you all. Watch out for penis cams or old guys dressed in full body cat suits or Elmo and lets hope ChatRoulette doesn’t get turned into another social networking site.
