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"Chatroulette, the random video chat website that became a minor pop culture phenomenon, has been shut down. The site now hosts a message saying \"experiment #1 is over\" and that a \"renewed and updated version\" will launch tomorrow.\nBut what will change? Probably a lot. Sean Parker (founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook) was working in some capacity with teen-aged Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy to work out the site's long-term potential. However, TechCrunch has just reported an unconfirmed rumor that Parker is no longer working on the project.\nWhether he's working on it now or not, though, his original comments about the site might tell us what to expect. Parker said he believed the site could be made more interesting (and that it could avoid the incessant penis problem) by automatically directing users to people who are \"nexted\" the least. In theory, that could reduce the hit-and-miss nature of the experience, but it would be challenging to execute it right.\nHow would the site's algorithms decide who gets the interesting users and who gets the less interesting ones? Would the site be divided into ghettos of interesting and uninteresting people, kind of like the dating site OkCupid invisibly matches users by attractiveness? We might find out tomorrow when Chatroulette relaunches.\nUp to this point, only very small updates have been made to the site as it originally appeared, including channels and local matching. That hasn't stopped it from birthing numerous viral sensations like Merton the piano guy.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/08/22/chatroulette-down/>