If you came here to get the web’s leading Chatroulette Clone script for you to run it on your own web site, you’ve come to the right place. Get it now!
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you might have heard of the latest Internet hype: Chatroulette.
In essence the site is a web cam speed dating platform.
Instead of letting you decide whom you video chat with, it keeps connecting you randomly. At peak times more than 50.000 users join Chatroulette, with an average of 20.000 per night.
The service spread viral and gained so much popularity, that even the New York Magazine and “Good Morning America” picked it up as one of their topics.
Now, some call Chatroulette scary, some even dangerous but most users seem to enjoy the experience.
I gave Chatroulette a try but it didn’t give that much to me. However, given my background in technology and my love for all-things-Internet, I got intrigued by the question what it would mean to build something like Chatroulette.
As a strange coincidence, our plans for spending this weekend kind of collapsed with good friends stuck in sudden snow. That gave me some unexpected free hours, I could use to dive deeper into it.
The original Chatroulette is an Adobe Flex 3 application. And here it was, another coincidence: I’ve been part of the Flex 3 pre-release team!
Despite the hype around HTML 5 (which has yet to prove all of its many promises to us) I do like Adobe’s Flash platform. While I haven’t coded anything in Adobe Flex for more than a year, I remembered that I loved working with the tools and the language.
One thing that stroke me was that I couldn’t image Chatroulette using any of Adobe’s Flash Media Server offerings. Back when I was involved into the platform, there was only one way to create video sharing experiences with Flash – and that was very expensive.
Chatroulette must either have had done anything proprietary, or the Flash platform must have had evolved, while I’ve been away.
Turns out, the later is true: Adobe recently introduced Stratus, a hosted service that helps orchestrating peer-2-peer connections between Flash player instances. While the service is involved during the media stream setup, the audio and video payload is not distributed through Adobe’s servers, hence the peer-2-peer nature:
Having identified this missing piece in my overall picture, I fired up Flex Builder 3 and started to code a prototype and codenamed it “CamCarousel”, as a little homage to the original Chatroulette. :)
It took me a day to build CamCarousel‘s basic skeleton, including a lightweight PHP based back end, that provides a RESTful API to manage sessions, preferences, etc. I decided to give CamCarousel some advanced features, like connection preferences and more sophisticated handling of connection issues.
It’s sort of a fascinating aspect of developing software that once you set out for a journey, it sometimes takes you farther than expected. That happened to me with this project and so I spent more time on fleshing out the details.
Initially I planned to just do a little proof-of-concept, purely out of curiosity and – of course – fun. However, CamCarousel grew quite significantly during the day.
I ultimately decided to get CamCarousel.com and host the Flex application there.
What’s next?
Well, to be honest, I’m not sure. I’m contemplating releasing the Flex project to the open source community, for others to build upon it. I might as well just enhance the service on my own during my spare time, sort of as a hobby project that keeps me coding (which after all, I still like).
I’m contemplating support for white-labeling, themes and premium accounts. All of this is really just ideas at the moment.
If you’ve got some time, give CamCarousel a try and let me know your thoughts. If you can’t find a partner there, it’s maybe because not enough people know about it, yet.
Feel free to help spreading the word by tweeting, facebooking and what-not about CamCarousel.
I’m very much looking forward to any feedback.
About Ralf
The day I coded a (better) Chatroulette Clone: CamCarousel! http://bit.ly/9njbTu
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The day I coded a (better) Chatroulette Clone: CamCarousel! http://bit.ly/9njbTu /via @24z
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@primary0 http://www.24100.net/2010/02/chatroulette-clone-camcarousel/
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Here’s a good visualization of all the technologies that Chatroulette uses and all similar sites:
http://thisislike.com/chatroulette-website/visual
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
Anytime something catches fire real quick, people try to find a way to do the same thing better. They think they see $$$ down the road. Ultimately one maayyybee 2 emerge but this type of service isn’t what a Napster or a Facebook was when it first came out. I can’t imagine the company that actually emerges to be the most used being a huge money maker.
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
I’m the developer of the MissedConnections.com main site and the chatroulette.missedconnections.com mini site has grown very fast – thanks for mentioning it in the article Sarah.
I’m happy to host mini sites for Chatroulette clones so if you’re involved with one feel free to get in touch (@eliotsykes or eliot-AT-missedconnections.com) if you want to help reconnect your users who lose their connection mid-chat, due to wi-fi/powercut/Adobe Stratus teething/etc.
For any of you that hear of other chatroulette clones, I’m maintaining a list here: http://blog.eliotsykes.com/2010/02/23/chatroulette-clones/
For the techies here’s a few details on what tech the chatroulette site is running here: http://blog.eliotsykes.com/2010/02/24/what-tech-is-chatroulette-running-on/
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
Try this awesome website : http://www.skomeet.com
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
I feel one big problem with almost all the clones is that despite trying to be different/better they almost all state plainly on their sites that they are chatroulette clones, rather than trying to stand on their own merit.
Also the creator of CamCarousel decided to sell his source instead of making it freely available, which may violate Adobe’s terms of use for the Stratus service
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
The other day i was googling this site caught my eye http://www.mynakedjob.com/ . As i explored the site i found out that this is a free web site which which allows people to find naked house cleaning girls in your city. This site is a good new for the girls, and women out there, because now any one who is 21+ who is not shy to remove there clothes can make from $50/hr to 250/hr. I think this site is one of the best sites that i have see so far in 2010 and http://www.chatroulette.com, http://www.mynakedjob.com.
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
I have the domain whoseeswho.com and @whoseeswho
Was planning to use them for something else but it is a great name for this type of service.
If you are interested, please get in touch!
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
http://www.chatroulettemap.com
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
New Korean Version of Chatroulette
Ranchat :: random chatting http://www.ranchat.com
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
Very original I loved it and have been watching chatroulette for a while. Only a matter of time till the spin-offs start (as we can see), ahhh the ebb and flow of the wonderful www.
I think the Russian Andrey Ternovskiy who created this should be given PROPS.
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
random chat without webcam http://www.skomeet.com , very great one
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
@#3 said:
"…this type of service isn’t what a Napster or a Facebook was when it first came out. I can’t imagine the company that actually emerges to be the most used being a huge money maker."
Are you kidding me? Think about how many different sets of eyes are scrolling through ChatRoulette right now. The site merely says >20,000, but it’s always >20,000. ALWAYS.
Now imagine that you own a business, and a 10-second ad for your product were to randomly appear after one of those >20,000 people hit F9 for the 15th time or so. If you DIDN’T pay for that kind of non-stop, global exposure, then your competitor sure as hell would.
Also, ChatRoulette offers something that every other website does not, and that’s proof of one’s validity. In this little virtual world of ours, people can and often DO pretend to be somebody that they’re not, but real-time audio/video brings with it the almighty power of truth. If they’ll just divide the randomness up into varying categories (i.e. male/female, age group, interests, etc.), ChatRoulette will only continue to grow in popularity.
Realistically, though, I expect one of these pre-establish conglomerates like Facebook or MySpace to install a CR clone on THEIR website, with all of the features that I just mentioned (and lots more, of course).
But there’s no doubt in my mind that this concept will be a HUGE money maker for whoever can actually take advantage of it.
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb
For some good CLEAN Chatroulette exhibitionism, visit http://showmeyourarmpit.blogspot.com/
This comment was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb