Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon, Chatroulette...
So starts Nick Bilton, lead writer for the New York Times Bits blog, who posted a very interesting article on this with a version of it appearing in print on February 21, 2010, on page WK1 of the New York edition. (You may read it on http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/weekinreview/21bilton.html)
In this article he points both to the good and the evil this new type of social network may breed, and how in just a few weeks its use was tenfold.
It is basically a game of roulette applied to chat, where upon accessing this website, chatroulette.com, your webcam is open to anyone on line who talks or not to you (language and more may be issues here) and whom you see in whatever garment (or not) they may choose to be. This can happen as many times and for however long the users may want it to happen. The most identifiable difference with Twitter and Facebook being that you may watch, and whoever you're chatting with may watch you too. But, further than that, Chatroulette does not require registration, names, or any form of information to be given prior to access; thus a major allure for those who are still naive to believe in total anonymity on the Internet, and a fishing competition in a fishbowl for predators.
I can easily see where this trend may be soon be outlived, however its immediate evil repercussions can spawn into 2 or 3 generations, and like Bilton pointed from another New York Magazine article on the same subject, this may end up as another home for pornography on the Internet.
In any instance it should be said that the possibilities and ease of use of existing technologies towards improving communications and serve other purposes is enormous, this just being a tiny example of what ingenuity and ease of use from a 17 year old from Russia can do. However, I can still see how this may develop or better yet evolve into a use that may serve an educational purpose in the long run. Can you imagine a round of Q&A between classmates, totally random, to get students to ellicit learning skills to create peer-to-peer collaborative learning?
