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I've read that both Fanning and Parker believe that chatroulette has the potential to become big.
I think that once they've fixed the obvious problems, what's left will be a big group of people nexting and nexting 'til they encounter the very limited pool of attractive or interesting people using it. Doesn't sound very fun.
Is chatroulette a fad that's over?
I think the notion of turning chatroulette into a performance platform is very interesting. Some of the Ben Folds chatroulette performances were pretty fascinating and managed to get at the one-to-many-ness necessary to drive large amounts of traffic on a consumer site (you don't need that to make an interesting product--but Skype seems to have nailed 1 to 1 video pretty well). Being able to have different bands 'battle' on chatroulette or have comics or musicians present new material could be great.
I say this as a former developer who created some of the first video chat rooms ever (CUworld in 2000). Talking to random people online eventually devolves into porn. You can't help it. Chatroulette got around that stigma by eliminating all approach anxiety to a conversation (Parker's words)--sort of like the exact opposite effect of perusing profiles of people on a dating site and messaging someone very attractive (…