Most of you have either heard about, viewed or spent hours on the “Chatroulette” online phenomenon. It’s a fact, this site did generate a lot of talk (not to say “buzz”). The principle is not much of a huge technical challenge, it is above all a very simple idea : give the opportunity to people to randomly connect with their webcam, to a one-to-one video chat room. If they don’t like who / what they see, a button lets them “next” (move) to another chat-room randomly. Then, of course, comes the question: “why did this idea spread almost as fast as the first iPad pictures available online?”

I decided to introduce those of you who did not check the site by themselves with the very nice video [see film on top of post] directed by Casey Neistat. He analyses Chatroulette with both a lot of humor and quite a good overview of what you can find out there. It is obvious that many early adopters got drawn by a touch of voyeurism, exhibitionism or more simply, mixed curiosity. It is also fun to see how it moved from there to yet another dimension when people started to play with Chatroulette [see film below].

For some users indeed (more into pro-active behavior), it became a matter of creativity… challenging themselves and others around the surprise effect and the short time given to “make an impression”. If Twitter is all about the question : “what are you doing right now?”, Chatroulette became all about : “how fast can you impress me?”

In his post “Chatroulette – It isn’t what you think” Gavin Heaton brings an interesting perspective on this :

“What we are seeing, already, is a maturing not necessarily of the TECHNOLOGY but of the PARTICIPANTS. Our capacity to work with and then transform the relationship we have with technology is accelerating (at least in pockets) – and those who are socially savvy on the web are engaging and challenging other participants. This is a trend that is not likely to end anytime soon.

The important thing to think about is not what the technology is doing, but which behaviours are these technologies enabling? Then you need to think about your business and whatever there is a connection with your brands, opportunities for your products/marketing or a thin slice of innovation that you can apply to the way you do business.

Platforms like Chatroulette may not not appear to have much value at first glance, but then neither did email 20 years ago. The challenge for us all is to find the value that lies underneath. It’s there. You just need to look below the surface.”

A technology or a platform is not a strategy. What you make out of it and how you make it relevant to both people and a brand may be.