WTF is Chatroulette?

Chatroulette is a website that pairs random strangers for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

source: Wikipedia

The new internet sensation service is interesting for various reasons – mainly because of several funny moments that are being posted all over the web. But what if Chatroulette did not become so massively famous just because of the service.

Chatroulette is actually the first massive scale application of Adobe‘s new RTMFP protocol which is perfect for P2P browser based applications without having to use an intermediate server, except for peer discovery.

I predict we will see much more similar services, mainly covering P2P video, voice and data sharing. YouTube was the Chatroulette of Flash Video, one of the first large scale applications of Adobe Flash Player‘s video playing and Flash Media Server’s video serving capabilities, leading to wide spread adoption of Flash for video distribution.

But back to Chatroulette. From my perspective it is fairly possible that the service was pushed a bit by Adobe and their PR in order to promote a service based on their technology, and once the dominos start falling there is nothing that can stop them, people start visiting the service, papers/blogs write about it and the circle is completed.

Anyway, I do think that Chatroulette’s life as a service will be quite short, but its core technology will survive to see other (perhaps a bit more useful) uses.

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