Today @fredwilson’s started a discussion over at avc.com about chatroulette.com. I’d never heard of chatroulette before today and I’m slightly taken aback by it’s simple freshness. There’s no signup. There’s no fee. You’re connected to an unknown other’s webcam, and they to yours, from there, you chat. Just head over and give it a go, it’s odd.
There is by all accounts a lot of NSFW material, as you’d expect from an uncensored internet. Fred’s son probably got it right:
“dad, you can’t invest in that, it’s porn.”
Maybe.
I don’t need to know everything you do. I’m not that interested.
I’m becoming rather annoyed of late with Facebook’s inability to understand whos status updates I’m really interested in. At a guess, the algorithm currently favors posts which garner a lot of interaction: comments, likes, clicks. Ok, that’s a very PageRank idea of promoting content and I’m sure it works, but I’d also like the algorithm to unearth stuff further down the pile by people who are closer to me, even if nobody else comments on it. I can see two approaches:
1. Let me define ‘best friends’.
2. Work out my best friends, based on Events we attend, Photo’s we’re tagged in.
I think the second option really has wings. If I see someone frequently in real life, there’s a fairly good chance I’m a close friend.
Meeting people
I like meeting new people through friends. It helps build an immediate trust which you just don’t get meeting people cold. However, eHarmony have just started advertising in the UK. 2% of American newlywed’s last year met on eHarmony. My initial reaction was Waw! or Wow! But the more I think about it, the more I’m realising they didn’t meet cold. eHarmony introduced them. Can a webservice step in for a friendly invite?
Point of note: It doesn’t matter that eHarmony is a dating site, I think this works across the board. It’s just a current example.
Can a webservice step in for a friendly invite?
That’s an interesting idea. Webservice’s know a lot about us that we already know, but they also know a lot that we don’t. Facebook, if they could write the algorithm, potentially knows which of my friends - friends would make good friends for me. Think about that.
This has massive potential in the online dating space.. but less of that. It has massive potential in just being interesting.
In the comments to Fred’s post about chatroulette today, I wrote:
I like it. Though it could work outside of Facebook with your larger social graph.
You’d enter your social network’s (Facebook, Twitter, Disqus…) credentials and then be connected to someone, somewhere, that touches your graph.
I guess a fun game element could be for the two parties to decide which network they’re both in within a time limit. Points awarded. Clearly you could cheat very simply, but I think there’s something in it.
@reecepacheco was thinking along the same lines:
Further, my social network is now pretty big and I’m linked to people who I barely talk to. Randomly popping across their screen might be a good way to reconnect.
Also, I mentioned being matched to friends of friends - this could be
anonymized, and then you have a totally different network. A group of
people who are connected somehow (so it feels safe), but don’t know exactly
how (so there’s still that random interaction). This, I think, might
actually work (at least as a feature of a larger network).
That’d be a very unique, clever, sort of interaction. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it, sometimes two sets of friends don’t need to cross, it could lead to some awkward situations, but it’s an interesting idea all the same.
Do we need this?
It probably works better with networks like Disqus. I really don’t know most of the people I ‘like’ on Disqus, but they’re certainly interesting people I’d like to get to know a bit better. That I think has a lot of use.