We all seem to love talking to strangers on the Internet. What if you could see those strangers, and confirm that they are, in fact, in their basement alone? Thus Chatroulette was formed. Last year saw the emergence of this new Internet superpower, a genius high-concept device that would bring the world together in ways formally unthinkable.
Times have changed. Society is plugged in. We've merged with the ubiquitous Internet, zooming toward that speculated singularity with unbridled passion and determination. It's everywhere, Google, Twitter and Celebnudes.com at your very fingertips.
And now Chatroulette.com is the new kid on the block. As CBS reported: "A few weeks ago we showed you a very beautiful video where a man ends up singing and proposing to a girl he had just met on Chatroulette. The video totally blew us away!"
Chatroulette specializes in random video chat. It has taken the world by storm. Random conversations can become meaningful relationships courtesy of 'Contacts' functionality. Users can add other users they randomly ended up talking with, or import contacts from their Gmail and Hotmail and other popular email services.
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Chatroulette has had amazing results in bringing guys and gals together -- especially as a new form of online dating. But it has also drawn enemy fire.
Law Enforcement Attorney Katherine McAnally recently told parents at a program called "Protecting Children from the World at Their Fingertips," that not much has changed with teenagers, they still pass notes in class but instead of paper it's a text message and instead of writing a letter, teenagers write an email or chat in a chat room.
McAnally commented that the one thing about all the technology is that "it's faster than our kids' ability to see the consequences."
She said there's no time to really think about what they are doing, giving the example of how a girl can take a picture of herself in the nude and send it to her boyfriend in a matter of seconds.
"All she has to do is go into the bathroom, take the picture on her phone and hit send," said McAnally, describing the equally new trend of selfshot mirror pics.
She said that 94 percent of teens, ages 12 to 17, can use or have access to the Internet; 84 percent of teens have cell phones and more than 88 percent of those teens are texting.
Another statistic pointed out was that 84 percent of online teens have a social network site, like Twitter or Facebook, and 46 percent of those teens have an open access to their online profile information.
"This means that anyone in the world can access their profile and see what they are doing," said McAnally. She showed a video about how online profiles, whether it be from a social networking site or a chat room, can be accessed and how easy it can be for a predator to find personal information in a very short amount of time; in the video it only took 20 minutes.
She showed a video on a new trend called "Chatroulette," which is a video chat web site that spontaneously connects the web user to random strangers on the Internet.
McAnally warned parents that the goal of this kind of web communication can be a little more "adult" that it really seems, referring to a part of the video that showed "nexting" which is a term to describe once the user sees a person or the person sees them, they can click next and pass over the person.
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An example of the upside of Chatroulette.com is the "Chatroulette Love Song" - which had 327 views in its first day and pushed past 2.2 million views in one week.
The plan was to have friends sing a love song to a random female stranger on Chatroulette, a website that matches people up for a video chat, record it - this is where a pizza, a priest and a ring come in - and maybe get 10,000 views in two weeks and 100,000 in a month.
There was the finding of The Girl. As the news media reported, "Chatroulette by its random nature has become a place that one is more likely to see something you would never want to see again over the course of time. So the search was likely to turn up a number of frogs - or more likely body parts that are not for family viewing - before finding the princess. With the advent of social networking there has been a noticeable change in the consumer mindset. Not only has the comfort level increased, but the popularity of services like Chatroulette and others have made video a vital component of the social medium.
"For these young adults, social is the new black. They are perfectly content with publishing the most intimate and private details of their lives in a public online setting. Transparency and intrusiveness are two words that simply aren't considered synonymous, and sharing, through video or otherwise, is perceived as something that enriches, rather than invades privacy."
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Chatroulette has become the hot new way of meeting girls -- and setting up a hot or romantic date.
Learn More About Chatroulette Girls and Chatroulette Dating. See "How to Contact Chatroulette Girls for Dating - Chatroulette Girls and the Evolution of Chatroulette." CLICK HERE: Chatroulette Girls Dating
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