by Sarah Mo (Thu Mar 04, 2010)
Have you ‘played' Chatroulette - the new Internet chat
service that connects users at random face-to-face via webcam? It's a new web ‘sensation' this week.
All you have to do is navigate to Chatroulette.com,
enable your webcam, click ‘Play,' and boom - you are instantly connected to a
random person somewhere in the world, to chat face-to-face in real time. Don't like the person you are chatting
with? Have a scorching case of
ADD? Just click 'Next' and you are
instantly shuffled a new random person.
The site derives its name from Russian roulette - the
ultimate game of chance. It
does not feel much safer, either. Think of it as Skype-speaking to a complete stranger, or an updated version
of AOL from the 90s, that puts a face to all the strange people that would
flood those seedy chat rooms to talk to anonymous strangers - the
chat rooms that were infamous for being hangouts of sexual predators and
pedophiles who hid behind innocent-sounding AOL screen names.
Now, imagine what happens when the veneer of an AOL screen name is stripped away by a state of the art webcam. That's right: a big, weird freak show. I have two words for you: Cat man. And,
don't get me started on the neo-Nazis gleefully Chatrouletting...
I tried Chatroulette for about five minutes but I felt
uneasy using it. Most of the users
I was paired with looked like teenage boys (Incidentally, the site was founded
by a 17-year-old). Despite my
innocent curiosity, I felt like a creep for looking at them, and I disconnected
from the site almost immediately.
Inappropriate behavior was bound to come from this site, so
I was not surprised to find this article about Chatrouletters indecently
exposing themselves over the Internet (three words: naked old dudes).
Many people have had positive experiences on the site, but I have also heard some pretty creepy tales. If you have
Internet-savvy kids, you might want to talk to them about the potential perils of using a site like this.
What have you heard about Chatroulette? Do you plan on having a go with it?
