It’d be interesting to have a separate side to the service, but _excluding_ anyone in your FOAF neighborhood. Then when you are ready to get down and totally devolve, you can be sure that you won’t accidentally end up awkwardly talking to your similarly devolved boss / neighbor / family.

Hi jhillOn the internet you can never be sure :-)See my followup to Max (just posted). I think this is another argument for some sort of selection pool dial. Imagine a setting “I’m totally drunk/horny/stoned, connect me to someone I’m guaranteed not to know” !

I’d love to see a investors/entrepreneurs chatroulette, or a developer / business chat roulette, where you could meet people at random but know that you had similar interests

This actually existed back in the early days of the internet around 2000.I was an engineer at a company called CUseeMe that developed much of the first generation of webcam technology. The company had a dual strategy of trying to sell communication tools to the Fortune 1000 and having consumer software for those pre-Skype and iChat days. To push the consumer escort in Henderson focus, we created a site called CUworld–which was basically the equivalent of chatroulette–though you could have group chats.Needless to say, CUworld quickly degenerated to porn and we spent an inordinate amount of money to pay admins to monitor the service. Eventually it was shut down as it provided no revenue and was a blight on the B2B side of things.However, one enterprising sales engineer and an engineer saw the success of CUworld in terms of usage and went off and set up a porn company based around chatroulette (I can’t remember the name). I’m pretty sure their revenues in their third month of business were approaching the revenues of CUseeMe as a publicly traded internet company vintage 2000.

Also, a few points on how the usage patterns on CUworld played out:1) People were really intrigued by the service and we had huge usage from inital users to the service.2) That initial intrigue petered out after about a month, and the people that continued to use the service were the ones most often flagged for indecent exposure.

Maybe something like Chatroulette could be organized around stories. I know that in the news industry they are finding that when you organize the citizen journalists around a story/topic the quality and participation levels increase dramatically.

My experience mirrored Reece’s exactly (sadly), butI think this could be an amazing event based experience- imagine “attending” the saints super bowl parade in this mode- randolmy chatting with folks who were actually there and it gets very interesting.

I used it a few times, for random chats. It takes a while to find someone to converse with, but is worth it occasionally. Some people thought it was pre-recorded so started giving directions… which we followed. It was fun and almost all feedback was positive!

Kind of like a meetup but without the awkwardness of trying to figure out who to approach and speak to

What a great site and follows your rules about keeping it simple to start with. In the space of 5mins I chatted to a guy in Strasburg, someone in China and laughed with someone else. Its certainly beats the latest offerings from Google!

It wouldn’t work on Facebook. Or even MySpace. It’s promise is the ability to choose your level of anonymity. That’s lost with Facebook. Knowing who the other person is, or them instantly knowing you, tampers down the behavior – making it less compelling.Also, if this grabs your socks, I doubt you’ve spent time around semi-porn site stickam, or the nether regions of ustream et al.It looks looks like a simple red5 server.