The concept of ChatRoulette keeps amazing me. Here's how it works: you open this page, press 'Play', your webcamera starts, and it's on. You will see two video screencasts: one of you, and one of another random person who has pressed 'Play'. If you want, you can chat. But what will much more likely happen is that you'll watch each other for couple seconds, and then another one of you will press 'Next'. And then you'll enter into another random encounter.
If you'r brave enough, go on and try it. Just prepared to be dismissed, and don't take it personally. Because it happens a lot.
Oh, and depending on time of day, about one in ten of your encouters will be naked. And mastrubating.
I propably shouldn't make too far reaching conclusions about the service (i'v only tryed i twice, after all), but i think this will be huge. Look at this graph (sorry for the link, embedding the graph in this post didn't work for some reason).
There has been zero media coverage of the service, but still in couple months it has managed to go from nothing to popularity of Spotify (or twice of that, depending how you judge the graphs), and by looking at the shape of that curve, i bet in the next few months it will be going past twitter.
Well.. Unless someone makes simlar, but better service before that. Because the thing about chat roulette is that it's dead simple. Anyone with decent web coding skills could have created that service years ago. And as a wannabe web developer looking for big ideas it blows my mind that no one did.
The exact attraction of ChatRoulette is hard to pinpoint - in a way, you just have to try it, so that you can feel it yourself. But clearly its got much to do with our self image, and getting feedback on what people really think about us. Because for most people, there's just no reason to lye in ChatRoulette, and you can get brutally honest comments on what they think of you. That is, once they first find a reason to stop to chat with you. But if you can take it the right way, it can also be a great tool for improving your own social skills.
Another layer is the diversity of human culture. You will see very different people in different places and different personalities, and that alone is exiting and refresing. You get the kind of "in touch with humanity" feeling.
And then there's sex. Like the frase goes, "internet is for porn" and live one on one masturbation session can be ten times as exiting as just looking at recorded porn video. Especially, when you don't have to pay for it, and you know that the other person is also doing it because they enjoy it. Of course there's the natural gap, between the ammount of mastrubating men vs. masturbating women, but considering the size of the market, it will still be huge. And there's always the possibility of having ten masturbating men with one woman. Some might find that disturbing, but i'm sure there are plenty of women who'd get a big kick out of it too. With sex, there's also the question of anonymity, but if your not comfortable in wearing a mask i'm sure there will soon be a sevices, that will automatically detect the faces from the image and blur them to make them unrecognisible.
Anyways, wether you'r looking for sex, friends, place to improve you social skills or just to wonder the diversity of humankind, you should test out the anarchy that is ChatRoulette. And expect for more fine tuned clones around the corner.