Chatroulette and The Inevitable Penis
Oh. My. God.
Actually, before I get to what has my jaw dragging along the floor tonight, let me start with a funny story.
In 1998, I was building and managing Community products at Yahoo, working for the amazing Ellen Siminoff. One of my products was Yahoo Messenger, which was a pretty new product in those days (ICQ being the big leader in the space at the time). The revolution of Instant Messaging products, of course, was the ability to have a real time text, and then audio and video, conversations with your friends.
As you may have noticed, I'm a bit of a voyeur. Not in the perverted 3AM trolling elementary schools sort of way, but I like to stick my nose in other people's business - I'm fascinated by how we all go about our lives. This fascination led me to propose that Yahoo build Yahoo Profiles and Yahoo's Member Directory so that folks could meet other random folks online who shared interests. For a while, these were very big sites at Yahoo, though they never got the attention they deserved (and then, voila - Facebook!).
Anyway, so one day I get an idea - I want to build a directory of folks who are using Yahoo's Messenger product so that people could find random strangers with webcams and connect to them. I figured if you liked the Dave Matthews Band and I did too...well, let's connect the two of us so we can meet and talk and spread some joy in this lonely world. I explained my idea to some co-workers and a few engineers, and before you know it we're furiously hacking away, trying to create a prototype webcam site (we were gonna call it Yahoo Webcams) where you could browse "live" streams in a grid format and jump into private conversation with anyone. Think Justin.tv but like 5 years earlier.
While the engineers are hard at work, I call Ellen away from much more important business so that she can check out this genius prototype site that we're cooking up out of thin air. I haven't seen it yet, as the engineers are aggregating the private streams of folks using Yahoo Messenger so that we could simulate real conversations and get a sense for how people are using the existing product.
Ellen sits down. Behind her, projected on a large screen, is a web page filled with a Brady-Bunch-like grid of 9 squares, each of which is black as the engineers pull in streams from live 1-on-1 conversations happening at that very moment on Yahoo Messenger. And then, as I'm prepping Ellen for this great idea, the engineers turn on the feed.
Immediately, the screen is filled with 9 webcams, all of which are focused on the naked crotches of hairy men, all of whom are pounding and torturing and twisting and generally harrassing their penises in ways I'd like to permanently erase from my mind, but I can't. Imagine Ellen, senior executive at Yahoo in an elegant pant suit, sitting in a conference room patiently waiting for me to begin my speech as a dozen men are working their meat on a screen just above her head. I looked up, then looked at her and just said "Um...forget it. My bad." Meeting fail. My genius idea had been foiled by the penis. (In retrospect, why didn't we launch Yahoo Penis?)
I tell you this story because, well, the penis has arisen again (pun intended). Click this link if you dare - chatroulette (I blame Fred Wilson, who wrote about this tonight). I can't begin to explain it's genius/absurdity/horribleness. Basically, you're put into a live webcam session with a complete stranger. And, approximately 95% of the time, that stranger has focused his camera on his dick, and is furiously pumping away. If you don't like that person, you click NEXT and you go to the next penis, err, person, and so on. It's the end of the world as we know it.
I'm not sure what else there is to say. I could blab about how porn often leads innovation in technology, I could make a statement on humanity, or I could just sit here in shock. I do have one question - why do guys insist on showing their member abuse on the cam? If they want to pleasure themselves, that's fine, but why the spotlight? Do you really think others want to tune into that?
Stay tuned for the forthcoming launch of my new cable channel... ;)
