Voices

Crossing the New Chasm: Focusing on Addiction, Not Just Adoption

Early adoption is not enough. Any successful product needs addictive retention.

YouNow, Web Video’s Live Amateur Hour, Bulks Up by Buying Blog TV

Live Web video can be one-to-one, or one-to-many, or something in between. YouNow takes the middle route, and that could be interesting.
younow

Napster Founders’ Airtime to Debut June 5

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s Airtime has invited media to a launch event in New York City on June 5.

Viral Video: 2010 As Told Through Google Products

For 2010, Google dressed up its annual Zeitgeist list of fastest-rising search terms with nifty HTML5 data visualizations and a music video that sums up the year while demonstrating uses of all sorts of Google products.

Voices

The Decline and Fall of Chatroulette

A few months ago, Chatroulette was the hottest thing on the Internet. Everyone from college students to famous musicians was logging on to the random-video-chat service to see what it was about. The New York Times asked whether it embodied “a glimpse into a surreal future, a turn in the direction of the Internet.” Social-media researchers analyzed the service, and Jon Stewart lampooned the media’s obsession with it — as well as the prevalence of perverts on the site.

QOTD: Chatroulette Ready to Expose Exposers

“We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behavior. We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have.”

Chatroulette founder and CEO Andrey Ternovskiy vows to purge the site of flashers

News Byte

Chatroulette Gets More Personal

The video chat service launched some new features this week, most notably Localroulette, which connects users through local editions based on their IP addresses, and Channelroulette, which allows users to start their own themed channels. Not surprisingly for a site with a well-documented “penis problem,” the most popular channel listed on the site as of this writing is “sex.”

Remember Merton, the Chatroulette Piano Guy? He's Still Here!

The anonymous piano player who isn’t Ben Folds has been abandoned by Mashable (!), but he’s still making videos. And he’s trying to make a few bucks from them, too. Want to help?

Remember Merton, the Chatroulette Piano Guy? He’s Still Here!

The anonymous piano player who isn’t Ben Folds has been abandoned by Mashable (!), but he’s still making videos. And he’s trying to make a few bucks from them, too. Want to help?

Meta Voyeurism! Watch Chatroulette's Users Watch Each Other, in Real Time!

Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth? That was months ago! But you can still learn some interesting stuff about the site and its users via this data dashboard from Chartbeat.

Inappropriate Chatrouletting