shufflepeople.com

The world is full of people that are rad, crazy, insane, offensive, lovable, gross, disgusting, unexplainable, etc. etc.

In 2007 Speeddate.com and WooMe.com launched as the first in-browser voice and video chat sites on the Internet that gained any real traction. What many people who use these sites came to realize is that there is often a slew of sexual voyeurs and pranksters lurking behind the other side of the video screen. The normal social guidelines that prohibit people from, say, pulling down their pants in the middle of the street in front of a stranger do not seem to exist in an online environment where anonymity gives people strange liberation to act out in ways that defy all social norms. This behavior give us insight into the true uninhibited nature of humanity. It is an argument for the idea that if a tree falls in the forest, indeed no one will hear it. Or if they do, they certainly won’t be able to prove it because there will be no way of identifying where the noise, or in the case of video chat the naked body part, belongs to.

Omegle chat service, a text based anonymous chat site, launched in March of 2009 and for reasons unknown gained some traction among the Internet community. Without ever hitting critical mass the chat service was latched on to and sustained by the Internet community’s elite chat addicts (if one can even label such a group “elite”). Omegle’s super simple text chat service connects strangers from across the world for a 1-on-1 text chat experience. The service, however, has yet to gain meaningful traction, for obvious reasons (it’s boring).

However, Omegle must be given credit for the rise of recent anonymous video chat phenomenon chatroulette and shufflepeople, which provide the exact same chat experience as Omegle but with video. Video is, apparently, the missing ingredient in Omegle’s chat platform. Chatroultee’s audience grew quickly as the service went viral and now hosts up 20k-50k visits at any given time. Chatroulette is just barely three months old.

We are now held hostage to unbelievable displays of human nature, witnesses to the advent of anonymous online webcam chat gone viral. It mirrors, in many ways, the early days of instant messenger chat, but with a new twist – cams. And what a twist it is. The sites are loaded with naked body parts, floating digital heads, stuffed animals, puppets and more. I even experienced a stuffed animal masking a (gasp) penis, which I witnessed all too reluctantly as the animal was whisked quickly away by masculine fingers who made a brief cameo before disappearing, with the stuffed toy, leaving only a limp dick in its wake. Oh the insanity that these sites supply, in abundance!

And the chat sites themselves are not the only thing that have gone viral. Blogs around the world document the behavior, flooded with screenshots of people who, taken aback, feel compelled to share the images as they bond over the insane, risque and startling nature of humanity that seem to lack any concept of boundaries whatsoever.