Taking Chat Roulette out for a spin!

I recently wrote an article about how social are we on social networks. A few days later I came across an article in the local newspaper about a site called chat roulette. Intrigued I decided to check it out. The site takes a new spin to the age-old chat room. Instead of connecting to a room of people, you spend your time randomly connecting to one person or other. If you like what you see, start chatting. These chat sessions are completely anonymous and meaningless! It is like running into someone at a local coffee shop. A fleeting glance and you are gone.

 A little reading around on the internet and I was amazed to realise that this site is supposedly the invention of a 17 year old. If so, you have to hand it to him for originality to say the least. Think of chat roulette as the internet’s answer to speed dating. Combine that with the speed of the internet means that your average speed date is going to last a mere seconds.

If anyone ever had, any doubt that we live in a shallow world that judges everything by appearances this site is definitely proof! As an advertising professional, the age-old truth bares its ugly head here. It is all in the packaging! The site uses Flash’s ability to capture streaming video from your webcam.  Though minimalistic in design, the site does what it is designed for.  Yet the site is definitely in demand with it being barely able to cope with the load.

Is it a way to meet new people and network online? Only if you believe in serendipity and the odds of that happening are quite rare! Chances are you will just get a cultural snapshot of the thousands of weird people that habit the internet. However, I did run into a student studying avionics with the US Air force and managed a decent tete a tete with him. The other person who seemed interesting got disconnected due to a bad connection. This does seem to be a problem with the site, or probably a testament to its popularity. The site can be quite slow at times. The same person mentioned Omegle to me. I didn’t quite get it at the time. The next day I was curious about how unique this concept was. I came across a few interesting articles and mention of Omegle, which is chat roulette without the webcam. The articles included one about why Chat roulette was worth a try and even an insightful one by the associated press.

What chat roulette does do though is make some of us become innovative with a webcam. I have seen people in V for Vendetta masks, fish tanks and a person who was keeping score to see if anyone would turn their head to see the message he had scribbled on a pad. There was even one camera focused on the person’s computer screen. Something like looking into a mirror. My creative contribution was to prop my Optimus Prime next to the web cam and have him point at the camera. It did get one or two favourable replies :D

How social are we?

Pick up a newspaper and you can’t fail to read an article about social networking somewhere in the paper. I just saw three articles, (one of which my mum pointed out in fact) that are all related to social networking. The one, which my mother pointed out to me, is related to the field that I am in- Advertising online. In the article, one of my agency’s top honchos Srinivasan Swamy, is quoted about the Indian youth’s online and social networking habits. He says the average Indian youth spends some sixty percent of their time online, via the internet or their mobile phone. This translates into 25,800 minutes a month. Which is why, marketers are now furiously factoring social media into their marketing strategy.

Right next to this article was another important article that should not be overlooked. The article covered how the rise of PC sales is increasing overall. True during one quarter there wasn’t very rosy for computer manufacturers, but the bigger picture tells us that India is growing more and more computer savvy by the minute.

The final straw which prompted this post was an article that I saw in today’s newspaper. It talks about how Catholic priests Father Nigel Barrett and Father Warner D' Souza from Mumbai are getting online to talk to their parishioners and the youth. Their strategy is to take the message where their audiences is. A laudable move, when you think that a lot of churches in South Mumbai are quite empty, and if they are full the number of youth and young adults present do seem to be dwindling The past year has seen everyone jump on the internet bandwagon, from wannabe India politicians who tried to ape Barack Obama’s successful online political strategy to the current generation of net savvy priests. What’s next I wonder.

This entire social networking craze brings me to the point at moot. Everyone knows that man is a social animal. I forget who said that first. We spend so much time on social networking sites, but how social are we? How many of us really meet new people online using such sites?

On one side of the scale is the user whose so-called friends list is just a list of people they’ve run into during their life and are way too impolite to refuse a friend request in the virtual world. On the other hand are those people who seem to add every Tom, Dick and Harriet, just to see the total number of friends in their list growing.

Most people are likely to talk to less than 10% of the people on their list. Honestly, ask yourself this. How many new friends have you made using a social networking site, whom you have been in touch with for over a year at least. Truth is not many I am sure. In addition, if you have, you might be one of the madding crowd who has chucked that friendship after a while because let’s face it, everyone is so busy that even online friends don’t meet. Online social networking is all about instant gratification to connect with someone when you have nobody at hand. And for that it works well, in a generation that is tethered to the mobile phone.

An Apple a day

I am still discovering the joys of my new iPhone and the new ipad has already created quite a ruckuss. To me it's a bit like something out of Star Trek or some other science fiction movie.

What interests me is it's potential to be the first fully coloured e-book reader. This means reading photograpy magazines will be possible to say the least. The question though is whether we will be able to read our own PDFs or will be forced to get it from an apple store, a store that will not have books outside the US market. You do have to hand it to Apple for aceing the design.

On one hand some might argue that it's nothing but a larger albeit stripped down verion of an iPhone a closer look tells us that the added screenspace has resulted in additional functionalities. And if the iPhone is anything to judge by, the iPad is going to be easy to use. Make no mistake this is a device that seeks to exist in that space between your PC/laptop And your digital photo frame. What would have really made it nice would have been the inclusion of an optical drive and a USB port. That said it is definitley on my consideration list.

The media though has been having a field day with it, I especially liked the economist cover stating a prophetic book of Jobs. Another is this viral video that is doing the rounds. What Hitler thinks of the iPad, hilarious yet addreses the grievances of most of the crowd.

For now I am keeping an eye on the other products from the stable of Apple :D