Chatroulette Calling (Don’t Answer)

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/9669721]

Now this is what every short video should be like. Casey Neistat’s short on Chatroulette is great artform and storytelling. Casey and brother Van have a TV show coming to HBO sometime this year. Casey’s only shortcoming is birthplace—not from Maine like his brother (Yes, I’m biased being from Aroostook County).

The video’s topic will offend some people (You’ve been warned). But it’s simply the best explanation I have seen anywhere about Chatroulette, the WebCam random chat craze started by 17 year-old high school student Andrey Ternovskiy (He’s not from Maine either, but from Moscow, Russia).

I haven’t yet bothered with Chatroulette. I’m too old and too male to be anything but “nexted.” However, as a journalist and amateur sociologist, I am fascinated by the idea of making random connections with anyone anywhere. Is Chatroulette really as addictive as gambling (e.g., roulette)?

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Avatar X on March 17, 2010 at 9:37 am

I did a little rundown on it here:

http://twittaw.appspot.com/thread/show/18ta

and called it ChatRoulette = Netmeeting for the 4chan age

You may like it since you should actually remember the stuff i quote and wrote on given you happen to be old enough.

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  Joe Wilcox on March 17, 2010 at 9:56 am
  
  You were a brave man to spin the Chatroulette. Oh, sure, I remember NetMeeting and the days when there wasn’t enough bandwidth (outside the corporate network) to do video. Now people broadcast video from cell phones.
  
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    Avatar X on March 17, 2010 at 10:15 am
    
    You need to take a look at the actual entry to get my full meaning on it. But man NetMeeting + the Microsoft Network Directory was EXACTLY like chatroulette. There was even a app that all that it did was to save the netmeeting ID’s as linked contacts (state of the art app!! 😛 )
    
    Bandwith was never a problem for me, what is hard for most to remember or even imagine now is that the variety of webcams went from black&white, fake ambar and technicolor-like and went from 4 to 12 frames per second.
    
    If people saw how those signals looked in the FIXED square views in the netmeeting callers. They would think they are seeing GIFs and not video. I also remember audio sounding like out of walkie-talkies or CB radio (if it had a good quality)
    
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