Chatroulette's Viral Growth

We have all seen this past year how the internet has acted as a prominent vehicle for celebrity news, gossip, status updates and essentially every form of communication. It is almost as though the idea of going viral on the web, has gone viral itself. The rapid pace of social media and social networking on the internet has not slowed down, and new sites are gaining popularity through the use of others in record times. There is no speed limits on the internet, and people and sites are traveling faster and faster each day.

Over the past few months there has been massive media coverage on the new and popular site Chatroulette. This site connects people for online face to face communication by connecting webcams. The 17 year old founder of this site Andrey Ternovskiy, Said that when he first created the site he had 20 users and then all of a sudden the numbers just doubled and tripped every day. He didn't use any advertising or promotions, this was a purely organic operation, so how did this happen? Well, other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter helped to spread the word about Chatroulette. Within a few months of creating the site he had 30 million users. This is drastic! It is crazy! It took social networking sites like Facebook around three years to have 30 million uses, so i'd say three months is rather astonishing.

"These new media have made our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the messages all the time"-- Marshall McLuhan

I think this quote is really important as it illustrates how social media has really brought people together to this massive online world (the internet) where pretty much everything can be done. News, gossip, status updates, comments, videos, online dating, online chatting.. and the list goes on. Being connected to the internet allows everyone to get the same messages all the time. This is how the popularity of the site Chatroulette grew. It is extremely rare in the OFFline world for a company or business to become so popular with no promotion or advertising. Actually i'd say its nearly impossible. But on the internet, this site was able to rapidly gain popularity through OTHER social networking sites discussing them. I think it is so fascinating, and really makes me wonder how many more companies and businesses will be posting their products and services to social networking sites. So many corporations are already on twitter, I can see a strong future for this. Everyday the internet seems to amaze me, the power of the internet is so extreme, and I feel really good about it because our generation has really been around and has prominent roles for the beginning of a lot of social networking that will only continue to develop and grow in years to come

Until Next time,

The active Citizen