The Buzz

Here's an overview of how many people are on in our area the evening I posted this.

One of the big news stories of late has been Chatroulette (NSFW), a service that pairs web cam users with another random user. Sometimes, it can lead to interesting conversation. Sometimes, it can lead to nudity. It’s really that random, and you don’t know who they are or where they are unless they tell you.

Except… that’s not necessarily true, as a new service, Chatroulette Map, plots the users on a Google Map. Dwight Silverman, who is a blogger at Hearst sister paper the Houston Chronicle, ran his information through the same way Chatroulette Map does, and it push-pinned the map about a mile from his house, which is accurate enough to give you a good enough picture of where people are located, and in less populated areas might even help you identify the person.

Even more importantly, unlike the original service, which shows you only people at random, Chatroulette Map lets you zoom in on a particular area and look at the users there. I pulled up a random person’s camera in our readership area (probably a bad idea in the newsroom) and got a funny screen shot of how many naughty things the person saw. But there’s other stuff, of course. But obviously this can make it easier to identify who’s using the service locally.

It was fun while it lasted, I guess, although the Daily Show segment on it was awesome (watch it below). Anyone have any experiences, good, bad or ugly, on Chatroulette?

SOURCE: Chatroulette Map via TechBlog