Chatroulette on the Daily Show

Jon Stewart's bit on Chatroulette is one of the funniest things I have see him do - and he does lots of funny stuff. If you don't know, "Chatroulette" is a service that lets you have video chats with random people, but it is also well known for what is euphemistically called "male exhibitionism". All sorts of reporters have been doing stories on it lately and he parodies that really well. If you haven't seen it yet check it out. I laughed my ass off when I saw this.

http://tv.gawker.com/5486224/jon-stewart-and-friends-use-chatroulette-on-the-daily-show

For this community, there is some slightly more serious irony here.  The service, which is really not all that complex, was built by a 17 year old kid from Russia, could get as much as 30 or 40 million for selling this.  It reminds me of when I built a trade portal years ago working with some developers.  We finished just around the time Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion.  The system we developed had a social network component similar to Dolphin, and my developers pointed out that the technology we had developed was more sophisticated than Youtube - which in essence was a fairly simple technology at that time, but hadn't made a dime.

Not sure what the lesson is here, just thought I would mention it.

Rob

Ah, Chatroulette. It's the future of web chatting, only this time with nudity, drug smuggling and drunken idiots who realize they both have a Darth Vader helmet on.

The future is bright!