Post #3 - Eric Chatroulette

I'm going to start off by saying I don't completely hate chatroulette. I think it's a clever idea in that it randomly matches up 2 people from around the world and tosses them into an unknown circumstance. The problem with it seems to be that nobody really knows what to do once they get to that point: two strangers who have the opportunity to talk and interact with each other.

Yes, it seems that many guys tend to want to show what they're packing, and the other half of the guys seem to be looking for females. Somehow, in lieu of that, I managed to see only G-rated video and I was on chatroulette.com for well over 45 minutes (I think part of that was me procrastinating as long as I could with work I still have tonight, but another part was the entertainment I gave/got from it).

I've gone on the site before out of pure curiosity, and of course I got some very R-rated content and some quite awkward interactions, so I changed my game plan. I went on chatroulette to entertain. I set my piano keyboard on my lap and started playing as dozens of users "next"ed me. But every once in awhile I would get a straggler, somebody that enjoyed what I was doing and wanted to sit around for some more.

I struck up a few conversations about music because at that point that's all we had in common. One guy not only recognized the song I was playing (Mad World) but also knew how to play it on guitar. So I waited a minute while he ran into another room to grab his guitar and we played along together. What an unexpected jam session! Another guy recognized Bohemian Rhapsody and starting carrying his laptop downstairs to his piano. He said he would play it for me (because I struggled with this one and he wanted to entertain too). Unfortunately, Shockwave crashed in the middle of this venture so that never happened.

Again, it is definitely an interesting idea, but people need to learn how to use it. Too many people just sit on the site not really knowing why and just "next"ing past everybody. I'm glad a few stopped to enjoy the provided entertainment, and wish in the future more people went on with some reason.