1. The nerdy, but totally awesome, kid who wears tacky sweaters. This kid will be able to name every starwars character, immitate every character on the Simpons and give you step by step instructions on how to make a stink bomb. Every one should have a friend like this in their back pocket just in case you need to find out what



2. The scared/nervous/bitchy college girl. Trying to get this girl to loosen up and say something can be a challenging game that you can play all night long. Things likely to work are putting on a mask, making a funny face, telling a (clean) joke or asking her random, goofy questions. 2 points if you get her to smile, 5 if you get her to actually talk!



3. The class clown. This kid is likely to make fun of you the second he sees you but don’t be offended, it’s nothing personal, he does it to everyone. Grow a pair and give him a taste of his own medicine. If you’re witty and clever perhaps you can be the one to leave him at a loss for words. Throw on your screen capture software and post the interaction to YouTube so the world can see how clever you are.



4. the guy/girl hiding behind some kind of mask or prop. Be careful, there’s a good chance your reaction is being recorded for a YouTube montage of ShufflePeople reactions.



5. the old guy who looks confused. This guy is great. He has no idea how he found the site and now that he’s here he can’t seem to talk to anyone long enough to figure out how to use it. He’s never going to get it. When he was our age he was drinking soda pop from a diner trying to WOO the class prom queen into driving out to lookout point to make out in his car. This 30 second webcam thing is so foreign to his generation he probably feels like he’s making contact with aliens.

There’s something about a young boy with a birth defect making fun of creepy dudes really, really funny.

This is partly due to Shufflepeople’s ability to handle a large simultaneous user base participating in webcam chat at the same time. Chatroulette users experienced many technical problems during the first few months the platform was gaining popularity. The site had a difficult time keeping up with the rapid user growth over a short period of time.

shufflepeople and chatroulette

Scalability is an issue that any website planning to cater to a large population of people online needs to prepare for. Going viral, become insanely popular over a very short period of time, could happen to any website, potentially. When a site is not prepared to handle a growth increase of the viral nature, the site will crash, putting the business in danger of losing this sustained growth unless they can revive the site quickly.

Shufflepeople was founded by the developers of WooMe, a video chat online dating website. The lessons learned managing a successful video chat website were applied to the creation of Shufflepeople, coupling both technology and marketing techniques to make a bring Shufflepeople into the forefront of the video chat community.

All video chat sites are still struggling with cleaning up some of the lewd behavior that continues to run rampant, however, as the sites become more stable there is more room for creative strategies that will launch what is currently a very simple video chat experience into something far more engaging, entertaining and useful for all.

tiny chat twitter

TinyChat is known for its creative methods of incorporating third party media sites into the platform. They gave users the option to connect via Facebook Connect long before it was common practice and are well known for their aggressive and innovative tactics at drawing users via Twitter. This has made them pioneers in the Social Media space,

Users have long been able to log into Tiny Chat’s main service, multi-user video chat rooms, by using their twitter logins. But now when users log in via Twitter it triggers a new chat room that only other people with Twitter accounts can join. An update is, of course, posted to the user’s Twitter account when created which serves as an invitation to all of their followers to join.

This exclusivity could makes users flock to the feature. For instance, imagine you get updates from multiple friends being in a TinyChat twitter chat room… that you weren’t invited to. It may encourage followers to create chat rooms and perpetuate the exclusive nature of the new TinyChat group video feature.

On the other hand, the fact that the service is live and only works if you invite people via Facebook, twitter or email may be too much lag time for the room to fill. Experienced Internet users have very low attention spans and aren’t likely to wait for their friends to get the update, sign into the TinyChat service and log-in to the chat-room. The barrior to entry cold prove to be far too great for success.

Users can, of course, invite random strangers to their chat room if they have a list of Twitter names available to them. Therefore, TinyChat’s new feature could prove to be even more effective if they offered a list of Twitter users that are currently logged-in to TinyChat.

Connecting via twitter offers other opportunities to the company  as well. TinyChat is a reputable company and are  likely to secure celebrities to host their own Internet chat sessions to promote themselves to fans over Twitter, as suggested a post on today’s FlamPlog blog. This could drive the new feature to great success.

What do you think about TinyChat’s new Twitter chat rooms?

Both Shuffle People and Chatroulette have tweeked their user interface so that you can play with the screens either horizontally or vertically. What benefits does this bring to the users?

We found that people want to be able to customize their experience and use it for creating videos and posting screenshots. The most notorious and popular industry blog is CHATROULOLZ which documents user experiences by allowing people from around the world to submit and post photos of their experiences on Chatroulette, ShufflePeople and Omegle. This audience participation was the driving force behind Chatroulette’s virality. Making the user interface customizable allows users greater control for documenting their experiences on the sites as they take screenshots and post videos across the web.

No doubt that these sites will need to morph even more dramatically as time continues to pass. The demise of MySpace illustrates what happens to sites that do not mature with time.  Users ache for change, updates and tweaks to experience and interface design. Although Facebook users complained, passed around petitions and begged Facebook developers to stop planned changes to the site, the proof is in the pudding. Facebook only saw positive results as they  made changes to the interface. This tells us that to stay current and popular you have to give your community new ways to interact and remain engaged.

We’ve mentioned this before and will continue to follow the changes that occur to Chatroulette, Shufflepeople and Omegle.

ShufflePeople.com

Do:

• Smile, have fun, be yourself, don’t hold back, say whatever you want, they’re probably going to next you either way, you might as well enjoy yourself before they do.
• Wear clothes.
• Play with friends. The more the merrier.
• Dance in a session or two.
• Record your sessions with a program like IShowU HD or Screentoaster,  take screen shots and submit them to the Shufflepeople Tumblr.

Don’t:

• Let your face show if you decide to show your naughty bits. Someone might record you you know!
• Ask a girl to get naked for you.
• Use ManyCam to play any of the following: celebrities (justin bieber, jonas brothers, jessica alba). It’s been done, a million times. Get creative!
• Go on the site with out a cam. No one wants to talk to a blank screen!
• Get offended at what you see, press “next” instead

And don’t forget to check out Justin Bieber on ShufflePeople last week.

Ben Folds, like many other celebrities, has demonstrated fondness for the budding social networking site Chatroulette that has captured the entire world’s attention.

Haven’t heard lately whether or not the young prodigy who created the site has found a suitable investor to pair with yet. Only time will tell whether or not this site will continue to grow and morph or fall flat as copycats race to compete with their userbase. Will Chatroulette fall apart like MySpace or grow wings like Facebook?

Justin Bieber on Chatroulette?

Looks like Justin Bieber is making his rounds on ShufflePeople and Chatroulette this week as photos surface of the young heartthrob across the Internet.

It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if the young pop star did make appearances on the anonymous webcam chat sites seeing as he got famous via another video social networking site, YouTube.

Shortly after the young buck’s YouTube videos went viral he was approached by not one, but two, major recording artists, Usher and Justin Timberlake. How lucky is he? Bieber decided to follow in the footsteps of the black dude (Usher) instead of the white dude who sings like a black dude (Timberlake). We can see why the two record artists were fighting over the kid. Who wouldn’t want to mentor a little kid who, when he sings, makes you feel like a little baby elephant overdosing on xanax?