Chatroulette
|
Type of site
|
Online chat, voice chat, video chat |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Andrey Ternovskiy |
| Created by | Andrey Ternovskiy |
| Revenue | Advertising |
| Slogan(s) | Welcome to the world of Chatroulette! |
| Website | chatroulette.com |
| Alexa rank |
 9,277 (April 2014[update]) |
| Launched | November 16, 2009 |
Chatroulette is an online chat website that pairs random users together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (text, audio and video) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.
The Chatroulette web site was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia. Ternovskiy says the concept arose from video chats he used to have with friends on Skype, and that he wrote the first version of Chatroulette in "two days and two nights". Ternovskiy chose the name "Chatroulette" after watching The Deer Hunter, a 1978 film set in the Vietnam War in which prisoners of war are forced to play Russian roulette. The site pairs its users at random, and allows them to type messages to one another while watching the other user's webcam.
Ternovskiy built the site on an old computer he had in his bedroom. The site initially had 20 users and then it doubled daily for a period, according to Ternovskiy in 2010. He discusses that he did not advertise or post his site anywhere; in fact, people starting talking about the website and the word of mouth spread gradually. As the number of active users grew, Ternovskiy has had to rewrite the entire code to cope with the load, the management of which being the most challenging part of his project. Despite the expansion of the service, he still codes everything on his own. Ternovskiy sought help from his longtime friend Vlad Kostanyan, who helped him with his side projects.
In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day. One month later there were 50,000. The site has been featured in The New York Times,The New Yorker,New York magazine, and on Good Morning America,Newsnight in the United Kingdom,Tosh.0, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In February 2010, there were about 35,000 people on Chatroulette at any given time. Around the beginning of March, Ternovskiy estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users, approximately 33% of them from the United States and 5% from Germany.
...
Wikipedia