Chatroulette.com, the site that allows you to chat in front of a webcam with a completely random stranger, is causing a sensation on the web, especially among teenagers. Its content is however to be reserved exclusively for adults!
A very random video chat site
It took a few months after its creation in November 2009 and hundreds of thousands of connections for the creator of the Chatroulette.com site to reveal his identity to the New York Times in February 2010.
Surprise – It is a 17-year-old Moscow high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy. The teenager explains that he created Chatroulette because he was tired of always talking to the same people on Skype, a site that allows you to make video calls using the Internet.
How does it work?
No need to register: to use Chatroulette, an internet connection and a computer equipped with a webcam are enough. The site immediately puts you in touch with an anonymous person chosen at random. She appears on your screen and you can talk to her.
Few people talk out loud. Discussion via written instant messaging is the most common. At any time, you can change correspondent by clicking on next.
Who do you meet on Chatroulette?
In about thirty connections, you can meet Europeans, Americans, Asians… Almost all users are men, aged 18 to 35. They connect, alone or with friends, for fun or because they are bored. But a large majority of them consider Chatroulette.com to be a porn site.
The principle
After you have equipped yourself with a webcam and connected to the Chatroulette.com site, all you have to do is “launch” the roulette wheel and you find yourself in a video connection with an unknown internet user who may be anywhere in the world. It’s up to you to socialize or not.
Illegal and inappropriate content
It is common for some users to point their webcam not at their face but at their sex or ask to see their interlocutor’s breasts.
In March 2010, after a protest from the association, Chatroulette.com (not recommended on its home page for those under 16) was identified by certain parental control software, such as Parental Filter 2, as “illegal and inappropriate content”. It can thus be made inaccessible to young internet users.
Unless you have been plunged into a deep coma in recent weeks, it is impossible to escape the Chatroulette phenomenon, this random video chat site that allows you to connect with the whole world easily and quickly.
Stronger than the cold and the snow, Chatroulette has dominated all topics of conversation since the beginning.