Russian student revealed as founder of ChatRoulette

A 17-year-old Russian student has been revealed over the weekend to be the brains behind the most talked-about web sensation since Facebook. He is Andrey Ternovskiy, and his brainchild is ChatRoulette, which connects users with randomly selected strangers. As its name suggests, the site has a very simple premise - to introduce people who know nothing about each other and see what happens.
 
After logging on, visitors are confronted with another user who appears on the screen via a webcam. They can either chat to that person or click 'next' and see who else pops up on their screen. The web's usual array of weird and wonderful characters - many of them naked - have taken to the site and turned it into a kind of global freakshow.

Blogger Jason Kottke wrote of his experience: "I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn't female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), three couples having sex, and 11 erect penises."
 
Although the site launched last year, it has only recently taken off. Bloggers were the first to sing its praises and now the mainstream media has taken notice. The site has featured in New York magazine and even got a mention on ABC's Good Morning America.
 
This weekend alone it has been the subject of media attention in Britain, the US, India and Australia – with writers delighting in tales of who and what they came across while using the service. And all the hype has helped make it one of the hottest sites on the internet. In December ChatRoulette had around 300 users, but after bloggers stumbled across it and the word began to spread the numbers grew. At the beginning of February it had 10,000 users. Now, just two weeks later, it is attracting 20,000 users every day.
 
Ternovskiy, a student in Moscow, revealed his identity after responding to an email from the New York Times. He said that he set up ChatRoulette as "a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people." It has now become much more than that and Ternovskiy could soon be cast as the next Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook who is now worth more than a billion dollars.
 
Ternovskiy revealed that when the site took off he had trouble coping. "I never thought that handling the heavy user load would be the most difficult part of my project," he said. But he admitted that the site had taken on a life of its own. "I am not even sure what ChatRoulette is now," he said. "Everyone finds his own way of using the site. Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service."
 
Users all agree that the service is massively addictive, but there are concerns about the content. Visitors are warned that they must be 16 to use the site and that ChatRoulette "does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material". But, this being the web, the bizarre characters who populate internet chat forums have flocked to the site. ·