With our store available at www.chatroulette-clone.net, we’ve decided to put our labs to chatroulette.pro. Starting today, the pro site will always showcase the latest development version, even if it’s in early alpha.

We hope you enjoy it!

Since the initial release, we’ve shipped six minor updates, addressing many optimizations opportunities and selected feature requests handed in by customers.

Our Chatroulette Clone now supports automatic reconnects (“auto next”), multiple languages including runtime-customization options and a unique-in-the-market way of handling high-load situations.

Today, our development team has started to work on Red5 support.

Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java. It’s freely available and supported by an energetic crowd of Flash/Flex addicts and RIA professionals.

So why is Red5 support important?

The current version of Chatroulette Clone leverages Adobe’s free Stratus service. This service aids in establishing the peer-to-peer connection, a straight, direct binary data stream between two Adobe Flash Player instances.

While Adobe Stratus works just fine in 99% of the cases, there are situations, where the UDP ports and protocols required to setup the connection, might be blocked by network administrators and their firewalls.

Additionally, during the rise of Chatroulette’s popularity, Adobe’s servers showed some real performance problems. Adobe has recently addressed those and the Stratus service is now doing extremely well. However, if you’re planning a large site – talking really, really large here, with 50.000+ concurrent users and more – chances are you’d like to control the entire infrastructure.

Red5 provides essential services, like shared objects and live video streaming to the Flash ecosystem.

With the upcoming support for the Red5Sserver in Chatroulette Script, you can decide whether you go with the out-of-the box setup, using Adobe’s Stratus services, or leverage your own Red5 installation.

We are planning to release full Red5 integration for the next major release, Version 2.0. We are eager to get it out within the next week, but don’t want to make any promises at this point.

Chatroulette Clone 2.0 will include the Red5 application, a Java web app, and the full source code for the Adobe Flex part. You will be able to seamlessly switch users between Adobe Stratus and Red5. Your visitors will not even recognize the difference!

We are also evaluating options to provide you with bandwidth limited access to our fully hosted Red5 Servers, in order to test your deployments, without having to go through the somewhat complex process of setting up Red5 yourself.

We are extremely excited about this new feature and confident to continue to provide World’s leading Chatroulette Clone Script with Red5 integration.

Check out all the details and try the demo.

I’ve discussed various options with some of the folks who got in touch. Finally I decided to sell an unlimited lifetime developer license, which will literally allow you to do whatever you want with the project – except selling it to others, of course.

You can, however, create commercial websites based on the CamCarousel application and modify it to suit your needs. This includes removing any attribution linking back to us. I believe, this is a pretty fair modus operandi.

Should you be interested, all the details are available at http://www.camcarousel.com/shop.

We are offering the source of the entire project for a very special introductory price, for a few days only!

Grab it and start your Chatroulette-ish site within minutes.

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.

Say “Hello” to CamCarousel!

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.