After a flurry of activity for a few months last year, Chatroulette has been absorbed into the cultural fold but not really noticed by those who don't use it. If anything, many Chatroulette users are considering ditching the video service altogether, due to the overwhelming majority of flashers and other perverts.
Creator Andrey Ternovskiy is taking offers from social media gurus on how to make it a cleaner experience for everyone. Rumored feature changes include an algorithm that can scan a given video and detect a penis, thus blocking those users who like to show off their naughty bits again and again. Other possibilities include flagging users who are constantly skipped over. This latter idea is tougher to police: While it's likely that the users who get nexted (meaning, others press "next" in response) are probably displaying bad behavior, the converse is true as well. Some users get a kick out of nexting anyone, as a sort of social rejection, and we wouldn't want those people to get blocked just because they got randomly paired up with a nasty person.
While Ternovskiy has been rebuffing offers for the most part, he seems to have found a kindred spirit in Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who is currently working on his own startup, Path (all we know is that it involves sharing lists). There's no word on what, if anything, Fanning will contribute in his advisory role to Chatroulette, but we hope that it gets the dicks (literal and figurative) off the screen sooner rather than later.
[TechCrunch]
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment!