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?
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Tech-Talch – Chatroulette | ||||
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SOURCE: Chatroulette Map via TechBlog
Andrey Ternovskiy, who says he is a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia is the brain behind chatroulette. recently, chat roulette has gain much popularity and the craze continue to go on and on.
Site like this is very good for social deprived people and will connect anonymously to randomly selected user.
Other site like SpinTheCam.com also provide such platform that allow users to randomly connected to other users and with live video chat.
It is really fun being being there and frenzy continue while the game last.
Comment by deyes-Spin The Cam — March 12th, 2010 @ 5:44 am
Along with everyone else who saw the Daily Show or read the Times article a few weeks back, I want out and tried Chatroulette. Scary and funny and gross. What I want to know, is my picture going to end up on Chartroulette map?
Comment by Tom Laney — March 20th, 2010 @ 9:23 am
A quick glance in my area shows no updates, as far as I can tell, in over two weeks… perhaps this was a proof of concept idea that is a snapshot in time, or maybe they’re still working that out, but right now, it’s still people who used the service in late February/early March at the time they were capturing data.
Comment by Josh O'Connell — March 20th, 2010 @ 11:44 am