Monday, March 30, 2009

Omegle: As Anonymous as You Want to Be

Omegle pairs up strangers for a random conversation about anything, everything or nothing. The site bills itself as "a brand-new service for meeting new friends."

Assuming you make new friends with people whom you know nothing about, don't necessarily share any common interests and may or may not live anywhere near one another. If you like making these sorts of new friends, then yeah, Omegle is the perfect service for you to meet.

When you access Omegle, its algorithm pick another user at random, shoves you together into a virtual version of an empty elevator, then slams the doors closed, leaving the two of you alone together in silence. You may choose to speak, mutter a few pleasantries or wait out the ride in silence until one of you reaches your floor.

What is the intimacy factor of sitting at your keyboard waiting for someone you don't know to enter your life? What words do you hope will appear? What will you say to a stranger that you won't say to your non-virtual friends. Will this format of anonymous conversation become a means of therapy for the uninsured or out of work?

While Omegle says the "chats are completely anonymous," it notes, "there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like." What's more, there is nothing to stop you from making up any personal details you'd like. This sounds eerily similar to Hitchcock's "Stranger on a Train."

Perhaps this "service" will grow more sophisticated. Will there eventually be an option to select a topic for the chat before being paired with a stranger? Say if I wanted to talk about Congress or the 2010 CA governor's race, then I could enter that in a text field, and a stranger could select that topic? Also, how will this be monetized and what's to keep it from becoming some creepy anonymous sex-chat platform?

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