Chatrandom

In the roulette live streaming video chat world, Chatrandom has recently ascended to greatness. It now is pretty much in direct competition with the big boys, Chatroulette and Omegle, and it’s actually gaining on them, slowly but surely. The craziest part about it is they entered the game pretty late compared to most other imitators. A combination of smart marketing and adding new chat room options into the mix seems to have propelled them up to their current #3 or so position, at least popularity-wise. This, of course, is huge, because once a site like this obtains what I like to term a “critical mass” of users, the sky is the limit as to growth. The reason for this is as with any chat site, the number of users has a direct effect upon the experience visitors have and how much they like the site, which then of course has a direct effect upon whether they will come back again, tell their friends, about it, and so on.

In terms of the extra features Chatrandom has on top of the usual random webcam chat, it has a couple more options to choose from. First, it has one it calls “Chat Rooms”. This option leads to a flash-based software application where you can enter different rooms, typically limited to 200 people each, and can view lots of different people on their webcams all at the same time, show your own live feed, have private video calls, or just text chat, all to your heart’s content. There are a lot of other features too, but that’s the general idea, so let’s move on the the next option available. The next option is called “Multi Chat”. This option seems to be more focused on putting on a show more than the ability to have private conversations and what not. You can see how many people are viewing each live video feed, and shift between different rooms. You can of course also put on your own show, and attempt to gain a lot of viewers, etc. A cool part of this chat option is you can watch as many as four different live video streams at the same time. So, if you like what you hear check out Chatrandom at www.chatrandom.com.

Omegle

 So this is actually the site that started it all. Way back on March 25th, 2008, an 18-year-old high school student by the name of Leif K-Brooks founded Omegle, the first (as far as I am aware) true random roulette chat site. No, Chatroulette was NOT first, Omegle was. Many people either don’t know this or simply don’t give Omegle the credit it deserves, so we’ll give it plenty of credit right now! However, the site did not start with a video option, it was strictly text-only, so Chatroulette actually does deserve a lot of credit as well for making the progression to webcams. Similar to Chatroulette, Omegle did actually receive quite a bit of press coverage, and it subsequently went viral, propelling it to huge popularity. However, it didn’t receive attention on the same level as Chatroulette because the addition of video really made a major difference, and, when Omegle added a video option of its own it became more popular than it ever was at any point before – so the emergence of the video roulette functionality really benefited it despite the fact that it had new competition. As of right now, Omegle has not only caught up to Chatroulette, but surpassed it in terms of visitors! Crazy!

So, you might wonder, how is it that Omegle is now beating out the first random live video chat site who garnered all the biggest headlines? Quite frankly, it has more to offer. On top of the normal webcam roulette option, Omegle adds in a text-only option. Then, they take things another step further by allowing users to specify their interests and be connected to someone else with similar interests. This is huge! Rather than having to sift through countless users to find the person who is willing to chat with you about World of Warcraft you can now just type in World of Warcraft and find a match right away. You can brag about your character and possibly get a sweet reaction to boost your ego, hurray! But hold on, the features aren’t done yet. Omegle has yet another sweet option called “spy mode” where you can pose a question and then “spy” on two people as they argue about it! The more ridiculous a question you pose, the more awesome and entertaining the ensuing debate. It’s mad cool. Give them a visit at www.omegle.com.

Chatroulette

 This site really pushed the random chat niche into the forefront with it’s roulette webcam format. Although it doesn’t get credit for coming up with the concept of random stranger one-on-one chatting in the first place (that goes to Omegle), it still deserves a TON of credit for the attention it brought to the category, and the subsequent massive boost in popularity all the sites in the niche received. You see, Chatroulette made the important jump from text-only to video, and the significance of that simply cannot be overstated, it was HUGE. Ask anyone, and the majority will say video chatting is more entertaining than text-only communication, it’s a no-brainer! Anyway, Chatroulette went viral because of the addition of live cam streams, and it was picked up by media outlets all over the globe, propelling it to instant poularity.

Nowadays the website isn’t quite as popular as it was in its heyday, but it still gets millions of visitors a month so…it’s definitely not a failure. Plus, it’s current numbers are holding steady, just as they have since the initial attention wore off, so don’t expect Chatroulette to be going away any time soon! That being said, it really hasn’t changed a whole lot since the beginning with everything said and done. While trying to combat the male genitalia problem the site has been through numerous renditions before basically reverting back to where it began, with one major caveat though. Now, you have to be logged in in order to use the site. Nobody can see who you are or anything, but you still have to have an account. My guess is this was done to make banning people a more effective means of moderation, because now they have to recreate accounts over and over which is more of a hassle maybe than before, where they could just change their IP address. But yea, you can check out Chatroulette at www.chatroulette.com.

Camzap

Camzap Camzap is a pretty popular roulette / random video chat website. I’m not really sure when it was founded, but I do think it was one of the earlier Chatroulette imitators, which worked out to its benefit. Obviously, the earlier you jump into a new niche the easier it is to gain traction, and Camzap seemed to initially focus on or at least somehow attract the entire international market in a somewhat unique way. It doesn’t do very well in the USA, but it does very well in Brazil and Columbia, for example. I don’t know if this was Camzap’s marketing plan from the beginning or what, but it definitely seems to have worked out quite well for them.

In terms of features, Camzap has the roulette chat basics, but it also has a new beta version in the works that seems to involve a registration system. This new system allows you to search based on gender, age, location, and what that person is interested in / looking for as well. However, whether or not this system will work well in a niche that is known for it’s anonymity remains to be seen. The way they attempt to combine the registration with the random webcam chat may or may not be successful, only time will tell, after all it is still in beta. Anyway, check them out at www.camzap.com.

BestRouletteChatSites.com – We Kewl, Nuff Said.

Hello, and welcome to our site. The focus of our site, is that we are super kewl, and that’s it. Ha, just kidding. Obviously, based on the name, our focus is on the best-est most awesome-est roulette chat sites on the internet. And thus, we will be writing numerous reviews, ratings, rankings, and so on, and thereby completely and thoroughly analyzing all the sites in the roulette chatting niche. This will include the big dawgs like Chatroulette, and plenty of the little dogs as well, like [insert site you’ve never heard of before]. So yea, the whole process and final product should be super dooper kewl and uber awesome, which means you have a lot to look forward to so you better come back and explore. If you don’t, we’ll be pissed, and you don’t want to make people as uber kewl as us pissed, because if you do you’ll be totally sorry, and yea, what now.

-GOOBER