If you haven’t heard of the web sites chatroulette or pleaserobme, they’ve not been around long. The worldwide media has sort of picked them up, but haphazardly. They’re both very provocative sites, but in different ways. Pleaserobme.com is deliberately provocative, a message site not especially intended to last long. Chatroulette is by its nature thought provoking, but that’s not what it’s trying to do.

chatroulette.com

The concept and implementation of chatroulette is utterly simple: You must have a webcam and microphone. Go to the site Chatroulette. Test your gear in a panel. Push the PLAY button. The other person’s webcam image shows in another panel, if they choose to let you see it. You can click NEXT, STOP, or REPORT. Most of the time, you’re pressing NEXT because somebody didn’t want to connect to you, or you don’t want to engage them. If you want to chat, just start talking. Chatroulette keeps a running text message to show your current status. That’s it, technically.

Of course, that’s not it at all. This is all about people skills on the quick. Skill with instant identification of personalities (which I suspect we’re not as accurate at this as we think we are), and then skill at communication. It can be like speed dating with a three second clock. It can be excruciatingly awkward: Both parties are trying to communicate, but not finding a way to do it. Language is not specified automatically, so if you want to chat, the first order of business is language. Or it can be disgusting: There’s plenty of flesh and other funky business to be seen, quickly, although by rule this is not allowed on Chatroulette. You can report it. Or it can be a delight: Once in a while you actually strike up a good conversation with interesting people in far-flung parts of the world.

Chatroulette is not like anything else; it provides a more or less novel situation. You could literally ‘meet’ a dozen people in a session, while scanning perhaps more than a hundred. It’s in real time, so there’s no place to hide, no avatar, no cooked bio – just your mug shot and your voice. It’s the same deal for the other people. In Chatroulette what you see (and hear) is what you get. Refreshing? Maybe. For some people it will be nerve-wracking, for others an opportunity to exploit. You’d better be a believer in “It takes all kinds….”

pleaserobme.com

On the face of it, this is just a web site with a provocative title. However, it takes information from Twitter (it could be most any social network web sites) and uses that to show people who are not at home, and therefore their house/room can be robbed. Really? I suppose. The statements from people with public information like John Doe: “I’m on the way to the store. Cold night” could lead to a thief checking out the residence.

Not really. There’s no way to know from tweets whether the person is alone at home or not. So the point is something less than ‘real’ – yet it’s effective. You could be robbed, or mugged, or have your bank account accessed by information you publish on social networks. It’s probably already happened, only in the wild it happens and people wouldn’t know it. The site has a purpose, to demonstrate the potential insidious uses of social networking information. Its other purpose is to draw commercial attention to the web designers, which it seems to have succeeded in doing.

What these two quite different sites have in common is the ability to tap the technology of the Internet – in one case the video/audio, in the other the social networking information – to provide something previously not seen, something new in the world. The both have ‘gimmicks,’ but that’s how it’s going to go on the Internet. There are a lot more ‘surprises’ using technology and information unique to the Internet. Some of will be entertaining (or even good), some of it will not be good at all.