Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what they’d seen. The site activates your webcam automatically when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive-one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.
Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February.
The first time I entered ChatRoulette-a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world-I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind.
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