First (and last!) impressions of Chat Roulette

With all of the tweets and news stories going on around the newest web tool, Chat Roulette, I have to admit, I was curious. Although most of the conversation about the tool touted how awful it was, that every other person was behaving obscenely and it was a bored teenagers strange idea…I still wondered about it (darn that curiosity!). But, I hadn’t checked it out, I just simply didn’t have the time. I pushed it to the back of my mind, and kind of forgot about it.

Yesterday, me, my hubby, @vetlovingpetshb and @elecsecurityguy had brunch at Memphis in Santa Ana, and over unlimited mimosas and french toast, we got on the topic of weird tools and unique websites. Which of course, brought up Chat Roulette. We started talking about what we’d heard about it and what it was really like. None of us new more than the basic principal – go to the site, click play and wait to see who (or what) shows up. It was basically a video chat room, where you just clicked next to move onto another person/conversation. We had all heard that it was definitely nsfw, and that the majority of people on there were men, showing body parts that we had zero desire to see…but of course, after those mimosas, the curiosity came back and so we decided we just had to check it out (curiosity will getcha every time!).

The first tries to get the site to work completely failed…apparently Chat Roulette does not like Firefox. So, we switched over to Internet Explorer, got the ‘play’ button and took the chance. We clicked play, and waited. Three things we realized right away:

1. It auto turns on your own webcam which means the other person can see you laughing.
2. It auto turns on your microphone which means the other person can hear you laughing.
3. No one can prepare you for it, but you’ll definitely be laughing!

As all the news stories and tweets had told us, it was a strong mix of obscenity, with a few normal (albeit bored) people. We lasted about an hour on the site, clicking through about 15-20 different people, and had only one normal conversation, with a college kid in the UK who couldn’t sleep.

My final verdict? This site is a wreck, will end up the late night game at many sleepovers or drunken fraternity parties, and I doubt it will have any real staying power. That is unless they can figure out how to clean it up, segregate the types of conversations and turn it into a safer site for viewing…either way, I wouldn’t venture back.

Have you been to ChatRoulette? What did you discover?

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