Chatroulette: The Anti Facebook Future of the Web

I love to make predictions. I have been reading about a new website that is becoming very popular on college campuses. Some have even wrote that this new idea will someday eclipse the gargantuan that is Facebook. It’s so simple, it’s hard to believe that nobody has thought of it before. It’s an idea that’s worthy of, well, Google itself.

It’s called Chatroulette. The idea is that you find random strangers to converse with, and you spin the wheel every so often to find new and more interesting strangers to talk to around the world.

You never know what you’ll find when you click next. That’s the roulette part. Sam Anderson wrote recently in NY Magazine about the surreal experience of the randomness. “Ït turns out that chatroulette is brutal…the first 18 people who saw me disconnected immediately. They appeared, one by one, in a box at the top of my screen–a young Asian man, a high-school age girl, a guy lying on his side on his bed–and every time I’d feel a flare of excitement. Every time they’d leave without saying a word. It was devastating.”

The site is ánti-Facebook, pure social media shuffle. Once you dive in, there’s no way to manage the experience–to filter users, search for friends, or backtrack and reconnect with someone you chatted with an hour ago. There’s only the perpetual forward motion of ‘next.’ Try it.