Betting on Chat Roulette

At any given time, you can expect to find over 20,000 people on Chat Roulette, the new one-on-one video, audio, and text chat service. After a slow launch with only 200-300 users at any given time as recently as late December, Chat Roulette has exploded as the newest way to explore and connect. Based off the same principle as text-only Amiga, Chat Roulette pairs strangers in real time from across the world to chat via web cam. The motivations are varied—to practice English, find musicians to jam with, to meet girls, to live out a persona—but the service is still in the free-for-all early stage. Garnering massive attention through blogs of screen shots and the occasional story of running into the Jonas Brothers, Chat Roulette is still forming as a new social medium.

Still in its infancy, Chat Roulette certainly doesn’t have much structure, but as with most new technologies and services, key community players can help guide the service into what it will become. Luckily, marketers have a chance to carry this torch, much as Twitter has been defined in part by accounts like ComcastCares and Zappos. By building a valuable presence and helping demonstrate the opportunities and faculties of Twitter, these marketers actually helped blaze the trail and create some of the mores of the community. Chat Roulette, though chaotic at the best of times, listless (or naked) at the worst, offers a new platform for advertisers to help create a community aligned to their offerings.

Read the rest of my article at the Social Media Marketing blog.