Five minutes after logging onto Chatroulette.com, sophomore journalism major Tyler Radecki had encountered a man wearing a skeleton costume, several strangers from foreign countries and more men masturbating than he ever wanted to see.
“It was one of the creepiest things ever,” he said.
Remember your parents telling you, “Don’t talk to strangers?” Chatroulette, an Internet meme sweeping the campus and the world, encourages users to do just that.
The site allows anyone with a webcam and an Internet connection to log on and connect with strangers randomly selected from anywhere in the world, hence the name “roulette.” If the conversation is interesting, users can continue talking for hours, but most Chatroulette encounters last mere seconds.
Users can click next to move to a new conversation at anytime. And Chatroulette can be merciless.
Some log on to meet new friends, others use the site seeking to speak with people from across the globe but most revel in the site’s sheer anonymity.
“It’s fun to meet and make conversation with people [you] know you’ll never see again in your life,” said sophomore business major Chris Colaitis, who learned about the site last week.
As the site’s creator, Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Russian high explained in a statement provided to The New York Times, “Everyone finds [his or her] own way of using the site. Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service.”
And the months-old site is growing fast, with thousands of users logged on at any moment. Ternovsky has already had to move to high-powered servers in Germany to support constantly increasing bandwidth.
“I am aware that Chatroulette is popular in the U.S.,” Ternovsky said in the statement. “I have never been there, yet most of the site users come from there.”
Some of the users from the United States are on this campus.
“It’s kind of interesting meeting complete strangers on the Internet,” junior economics major Kevin Green said. “Aside from all the kids jerking off, you can actually have some decent conversations on the site.”
“It’s also really fun to do with a group of people, and generally when you encounter other groups of people, they also enjoy the overwhelming nonsense,” Green said in an e-mail.
In fact, Green said, most of the site’s users are groups of college students huddled up in dorms like him.
Of the site’s thousands of users, Colaitis said he once even encountered a peer from this university.
“One time I was flipping through and met two girls from UMD,” Colaitis said. “They asked where we went to school, and after we said UMD, I saw she had a red Book Exchange shirt on, and said ‘me too.'”
Despite the incredible coincidence, the conversation didn’t last long.
“It was really awkward thinking we could potentially cross paths, so we nexted them,” Coalitis said.
While many Chatroulette conversations are fleeting and short-lived, Green said some of his encounters have endured longer.
“I have actually had a couple of two- or three-hour-long conversations on Chatroulette,” Green said. “Most of them are from 12 to 4 a.m. after a night of drinking, but it’s all in good fun.”
Ron Yaros, a journalism professorwho specializes in social media, said the site intrigues him because “it’s definitely a novel idea.”
But ultimately, Yaros predicts the site will have a short shelf life and fade like so many Internet fads before it.
“Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which people rely on to maintain contacts with their friends, this website doesn’t rely on anything; it’s just for fun,” Yaros said. “It’s like going into a bar for the first time. It’s a new thing and you have fun with it for a while, but after a year, it’s a different story.”
news@umdbk.com
