Russian roulette: the amazing history and further fate of the creator of Chatroulette

It was on this home computer that Andrey wrote ChatRoulette in two days

 

In November 2009, a new entertainment appeared on the World Wide Web – “Chat Roulette”. This is a video chat in which you can accidentally meet anyone – an American fan, Chinese schoolgirls, an Indian poet… For full communication in the chat, you need a video camera through which the interlocutor can see you. Next, everything is simple. Go to the site, click on the start button and see a random interlocutor on your screen. You have a few seconds to start chatting with him, or click on the next button and see another random face (sometimes it’s not a face at all, but something indecent, so don’t let your children on this chat roulette).

 

One American user, talking about his experience working on ChatRoulette (www.Chatroulette.com), found it funny that in one session he was able to “contemplate several people drinking liquor; two girls who were doing makeup; many guys who immediately switched as soon as they saw that I was not a girl; several girls who passed out as soon as they saw my face,” and so on.

 

In the beginning there was an idea

 

An ordinary schoolboy Andrei Ternovsky lives with his parents in an unremarkable 16-story building in a residential area of Moscow

 

Andrey Ternovsky, talking about the birth of the project, said that he is an ordinary teenager and knows what his peers love. The impetus for the creation of Chatroulette was video conferencing on Skype, where he often hung out with friends, but they quickly got bored with it. As Andrei himself said: “It’s boring when you know exactly who you’re going to talk to.” Having searched Google for a video chat that would work in random mode, Andrey did not find one, and was surprised. So he sat down and in two days wrote a program for the first version of Chatroulette on his old computer. In creating the site, he was helped by his knowledge of programming (he has been on the Internet since he was 11 years old and his father taught him something).

 

The name was also invented spontaneously – just before this, Andrei watched the famous film “The Deer Hunter”. In it, prisoners of war played Russian roulette. The name for the newly created service was born by itself, by analogy.

 

At first, the service did not have advertising as such. Andrey showed it to his friends, but they began to criticize the site and said that no one would use it. But the guy did not despair – he went to several forums and asked people to test the service, which is how he got the first 20 users. Then the audience began to double every day, and people started talking about the service in the virtual world. Popularity literally fell on his head. As Andrey himself says, “I woke up one morning and saw all these articles about Chatroulette. I called my mother to come and take a look. At first she was very nervous and didn’t understand what was happening, then she asked why I wasn’t going to school today.”

 

Real popularity came to Chatroulette almost immediately – in February 2010, the site was talked about in the media of different countries. In the USA – in the program Good Morning America and in the press (New York Times, New York Magazine), in the UK – on Newsnight and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In addition, the service was parodied in the cartoon “South Park” (season 14, episode “You Have 0 Friends”). And what do we see today? Now site traffic fluctuates between 0.5-1.5 million people per day (!). The numbers sound especially impressive compared to the starting 500 visitors.

 

“Everyone finds their own way to use the site. For some it is a game, for others it is a whole unknown world, for others it is a way of meeting people. I think it’s great that such a simple thing can be useful to many,” Andrey explained the reason for the popularity of his resource.

 

Media experts believe that the reason for the popularity may be the mesmerizing expectation of something unusual when you press the next button (although what you see on the screen at first can be shocking and almost crushing). Or this is entertainment of a new generation, incomprehensible to those who are accustomed to sorting information on the Internet and limiting themselves to certain boundaries.

 

The story of an ordinary schoolboy

 

Andrey plans to get an education, although he may put it off until later. Now he is engaged in programming, learning foreign languages and developing his brainchild

The American press is now comparing the Moscow schoolboy with nothing less than 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the Facebook network (www.facebook</ span>.com) and the youngest billionaire in the world. And popular American bloggers such as Asylum (http://theasylum.wordpress.com) and The Frisky (www.thefrisky.com) said that the site that Ternovsky came up with is “their favorite since the advent of YouTube” and even “ the holy grail of all internet entertainment.”

 

But in the 11th grade of Moscow gymnasium No. 1519, the young talent has problems, despite the full support of his classmates and the sympathy of his teachers. The fact is that because of the site, Andrei has no time left to study, and since January he has stopped going to school. Whether he will receive a certificate is also a big question. This is due to the popularity of Chatroulette.com – as soon as visitors began to arrive, the service required improvements. One day Andrei Ternovsky sat at the computer for almost two days.

 

So they are in no hurry to set him up as an example to other students. “I think that Ternovsky is not acting very thoughtfully by betting only on this site,” says one of the teachers. — What if everyone gets bored with its development and people stop using this service? Who will he be then? He won’t be able to get into university without a certificate.” Colleagues confirm him: “The boy is a very average student. He does not participate in Olympiads, much less in scientific projects. We think that among our guys there are those who will definitely become famous in the future.”

 

Indeed, the gymnasium where Andrei studies is one of the best. A few years ago, a youth design bureau was opened here, where teachers from the Moscow Aviation Institute and the Design Bureau named after them come to give lectures. Sukhoi. Another pride of the director is the students, who last year received nine grants from the capital authorities of 30 thousand rubles each.

 

But can this amount be compared with the millions that can be offered to Ternovsky for the site, classmates say. They themselves learned about their friend’s success from the Internet: “Although he is a very sociable, he is still a modest guy. He didn’t boast about his success. We, of course, knew that he was making such a site; he worked on it almost all day long. He said he doesn’t do it for money, but for fun.”

 

Andrey became interested in computer programming at the age of 11, when his father gave him a computer. Mom recalls that even in elementary school, her son could give out a couple of computer terms. Computer science, as you might guess, was Andrei’s favorite subject in the gymnasium. Friends say that somewhere in the 7th or 8th grade, he himself made a computer virus and installed it on the school computer. True, I fixed everything later. He also helped the girls: he taught them how to hack passwords from boys’ email accounts. “He doesn’t have any bad habits,” his classmates laugh.

 

In addition to programming, Andrey is interested in learning foreign languages. Now he is learning English and Chinese and plans to become a translator, although he has no plans to give up programming. True, Andrei is not yet thinking about finishing school – according to him, he can postpone this in order to devote himself entirely to what he loves. But he is going to continue his education in any case – probably, the opinion of conservative (as he himself claims) parents plays an important role here.

 

Ban for indecency

 

Like any large resource where visitors accumulate, trolls “graze” on Chatroulette. Often they just scare other users

 

Despite the fact that the rules of the resource prohibit the broadcast of indecent images, Chatroulette is often used by exhibitionists due to the lack of registration. A study of 2883 communication sessions showed that every eighth connection violates this particular point of the rules.

 

Andrey himself says that he wanted to create a fairly free, unmoderated resource, but some people take advantage of this and come to the site with disgusting intentions. And exhibitionism and voyeurism are prohibited in the rules. The system itself blocks violators, counting the number of times the Report button is pressed by those who do not like it.

 

However, this “fashion” continues. Some users make it a kind of sport out of counting naked people and body parts, then broadcast their “statistics” on the Internet.

 

By the way, one of the possible investors, Fred Wilson, among the shortcomings of the resource names sexual overtones, since the site is already filled with numerous exhibitionists and voyeurs, but they can “show” you not only naked parts of the body: someone will sing, someone will read poetry to -We urgently need to talk “for life.” “The Internet is a huge space used by more than a billion people from all over the world. Chatroulette can become a very convenient way to travel on the Internet, allowing you to expand the possibilities of meeting and communicating between people,” the businessman said in his blog (www.avc.com).

 

Culture in Roulette

 

This pianist became a real star thanks to Chatroulette

 

Some celebrities claim to have used Chatroulette, such as Kelly Osbourne and Nicole Richie. There are those who were photographed on the site, but did not confirm their presence there – for example, Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, the pop-rock group Jonas Brothers and Jessica Alba. Although, as for the Jonas Brothers, they directly stated on their Twitter that all the personalities similar to them on Chatroulette are fakes.

 

Additionally, on February 27 at the Soundwave festival in Melbourne, Australia, Faith No More streamed their performance live on Chatroulette.

 

Another user named Merton used video chat as a platform for musical improvisation. Sitting at the piano, he played music to random video interlocutors, composing the theme and lyrics as he went.

 

A recording of improvisations on YouTube, posted by Merton on a specially created channel PianoChatImprov (www.youtube.com/user/PianoChatImprov), collected 1.3 million views in five days. The channel itself, on which the musician promised to post more videos, has collected over 45 thousand subscribers.

 

Little is known about Merton. He is self-taught and has not taken any music lessons. He also claims to be not multi-instrumentalist Ben Folds, whom he bears a slight resemblance to in appearance.

 

Business or pleasure

Business shark Fred Wilson is still one of the most likely investors in Chatroulette if Andrey agrees to new investments

 

Andrey admits that he has no entrepreneurial spirit. He had no idea that the project would bring him money. But when the service began to grow rapidly, the guy had to borrow $10 thousand from his parents, although he soon repaid the debt. At first, Andrey used AdSense (a contextual advertising service developed by Google). Then I worked with Mamboo.com for several weeks. Now the service, according to its creator, brings in about $1,500 a day.

 

Chatroulette employs 4 programmers, although the site does not have its own office. Andrey found all of them on the Internet, and one of them works in the USA, in Virginia, and the other in Belarus.

 

In addition, about 200 venture capital companies from Silicon Valley contacted Andrey. ChatRoulette has attracted the attention of businessmen and investors from all over the world, including giants such as Google, Skype and Facebook. In Russia, Andrey’s site is monitored by local trendsetters – Yandex and Digital Sky Technology (http://dst-global.com/), whose founder and president, Yuri Milner, is the only Russian entrepreneur who owns a stake in Facebook. Yu. Milner (www.snob.ru/profile/about/5240) offered Ternovsky a deal to acquire a stake in ChatRoulette.

 

Another promising investor, Yuri Milner, also remains out of work for now. Andrey is currently thinking about the future of his service

 

However, Ternovsky has serious plans for the United States. “The Internet is my world, my connection with the West. I dream of opening my own company in Silicon Valley,” Andrei told the German magazine Der Spiegel. A few days after meeting with Yuri Milner, who claimed that the young man had more prospects in Russia than in the United States, Andrei still applied for an American visa to go to the United States for “reconnaissance.” He was invited to negotiations: American business angel, first Twitter investor Fred Wilson – in New York, and the eVenture fund (www.eventureinternet.com) – in San Francisco.

 

As Andrey says, his head is full of different ideas. He doesn’t know if he wants to work for a well-known company. “On the one hand, I would like to live in the USA for some time, and this requires money. I would like to work and develop my project at the same time. But I’m not in a hurry to decide anything yet, since it may well be that Chatroulette will feed me too. I don’t have any clearly thought out plan for life. It’s all rather like some kind of crazy journey,” he says. At the same time, the young man names the approximate cost of his project, which his friends from Silicon Valley guided him to, $50 million.

 

But Andrey developed a little intrigue around possible changes to the Chatroulette concept. Moreover, he does not say unequivocally whether these will be just partial innovations or a global change in concept. But he doesn’t plan to leave his brainchild, even if the fashion for it passes: “Nothing lasts forever, and I understand that people will get tired of “roulette.” When I feel a decline, I will change and improve the concept to support fashion.”