Chatroulette experiment #1

ChatRoulette everyone’s favourite video chat platform has apparently vanished and was today replaced with a simple but intriguing text message “The experiment #1 is over now. Thanks for participating.Renewed and updated version of the website will be launched shortly.”

So the question is was the whole video chat platform one big social experiment or have they been testing other elements or software using the ChatRoulette base? Was there a test, who or what was tested and why did no-one tell the millions of people who used the service to not show genitalia, random body parts, masks and obscene messages they were part of a huge social test? Below is a screenshot of the website traffic to my blog looking for information and news about Chat Roulette but it was only after the traffic grew 200% over the last 2 days that I looked into what was going on and noticed the “experiment #1” notification.  There is surprisingly no information available about when the site might be coming back and what form it might take which maybe done to build interest but it is more annoying than anything.

The Chatroulette website traffic has begun to grow again after spiking in March and crashing back to around 1 million visitors a month, but its likely this announcement might impact on that trend of increasing traffic, as typically ripping down a whole website will have an effect on your backlinks as well as any pages indexed by Google will likely drop out fairly quickly.  The items to watch will be the growth of the traffic once the new version is launched as this will show more about the profile of the websites visitors are mainly direct/bookmarked or driven by search engines.

Chat Roulette Domains

1. chatroulette.com
2. Charrt.com
3. T.vu
4. Semimi.com (under construction)

It’s interesting that the 3 primary domains of the 8 domains ChatRoulette has registered are displaying the same message, and a 4th random website Semimi.com which is showing an under construction message, so maybe its something fairly big that is being rebuilt? So it will be interesting to see how long we have to wait for the new website and if it takes too long will ChatRoulette lose their captive audience?