from www.cnet.com – Version 2 of Chatroulette was expected to make the site more user-friendly–and less salacious. But a short while after it went live, little appears to have changed.
Chatroulette went offline just over a week ago for a revamp. When users load up Chatroulette now, they will find a very basic home page with no guide to help them maneuver around the revised site.
Beyond that, Chatroulette has several issues. For one, if someone doesn’t have a Webcam, Chatroulette isn’t working. In fact, the person won’t be able to view anything. Even with a Webcam, connecting to the site was difficult. I was forced to reload multiple times before it would connect to my Webcam.
And then there is the issue of content.
Since its launch last year Chatroulette has been criticized by some people–especially parents–who say the site makes it too easy to discover sexual content. Chatroulette is designed to let you bounce from one anonymous video chat to another, with some people offering meaningful conversation and others offering something much seedier.
The new version was expected to address that issue.
It hasn’t. Within a few minutes, I came across people either performing or desiring risque acts on camera. All in all, it seems that the new update has done little (if anything) to clean up the site.
That can’t be a good thing for Chatroulette. In order for the site to survive, it needs to be able to attract advertisers. Chatroulette continues to say that it wants to limit sexual content to do so. But it has so far failed.
Until it finds a solution to the problem (or just embraces its other side), it will have little luck achieving its stated goals.
from www.pocket-lint.com – Chatroulette 2, the latest version of the random video chatting site has gone live, however it looks like its still not solved its penis problem.
While the focus has now been shifted to video rather than chat, a quick try at 9am on a Bank Holiday in the UK still presented us with the same problems as the previous incarnation of the site – around 9 out of ten people will have the camera focused on their balls.
What’s even more of a problem though is that there isn’t an obvious “next” button to press (its an untitled grey bar beneath the video screen).
Users happy to brave the amateur porn, occasional old man, and other people that think you aren’t worth the time of day will be able to expand the video screen to any size they want, select whether it’s the computers default computer and chat with others via a text box.
Proceed at your own peril.