Chatroulette - History and Culture

Chatroulette is a Russian based website. It pairs together strangers all over the world in a random manner and brings them together for webcam based chats. The users begin a chat in a random way using video, audio or text with another participant or user. The user is free to leave the chat with his current partner and move on to another one by just pressing the "next" option. This is known as the partner being "nexted".

Chatroulette was created by a seventeen year old Russian school boy named Andrey Ternovisky in November 2009. He got the idea for his website from chatting with his friends on Skype and wrote the first version of Chatroulette in two days and two nights. He decided to call his website Chatroulette after he watched the movie "The Deer Hunter", which was based on the Vietnam War in which POWs were forced to play Russian roulette.

When the website was first launched it had about 500 visitors and by early 2010 the number of users rose to 1.5 million. The Chatroulette website utilizes Adobe Flash to display video as also access its users' webcam.

In the initial months the website was funded by Ternovisky's parents and he soon repaid the $10,000 they had invested. He initially ran the website from his childhood bedroom and the site was supported through advertising links to an online dating service.


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