Chatroulette had a great promise - use your webcam to talk to anybody in the world. It is a website that pairs random strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection. You could have cultural conversations, discuss about new movies or trends, or find new friends all around the globe.
The Chatroulette web site was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia. Ternovskiy says the concept arose from video chats he used to have with friends on Skype.
In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day.[3] One month later there were 50,000. In February 2010, there were about 35,000 people on Chatroulette at any given time. Around the beginning of March, it was estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users.
All sounded great but then come the negative part, internet culture kicked in. According to survey approximately 1 in 8 of feeds from Chatroulette involved 'R-rated' content. But in the peak of chatroulette the rate was much higher. You could not get any few minutes without seeing men flashing their exposed genitalia, racist backgrounds and slurp, sometimes even horrifying images. People found a bypass to transmit recorded videos instead of webcam video. It was used to show self caused injures, animal cruelty, and even suicides. There were cases of real suicides carried live on webcam.
After that there was created a lot of software to recognize and block inappropriate context, user were being banned for 10-40 minutes if got reported by three users within five minutes.
But it didn't came back to the peak of 2010 summer. There are still some users of chatroulette but not as much as was hyped for. All it's now being referred as Chatroulette: A Sad Tale of Blown Opportunity .
http://www.chatroulette.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatroulette
The main idea was good, but as you mention content is something that can be control by a moderator or software in a blog or in a chat but for life video is more difficult.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, people abuse of the fact that in a computer you can be "anyone" there is not a strict regulation of who creates an email or an account in sites like this, if you are banned for 10 min you can wait or have another account and use it while the other is released.